


The Resolution of Our Elements

by america_oreosandkitkats



Series: The Resolution of Our Elements [1]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Cold War, F/M, Family Angst, Human & Country Names Used, Hurt/Comfort, Imperial Europe, Medieval Europe, Not Canon Compliant, World War II
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-22
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2018-08-23 20:51:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 35,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8342257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/america_oreosandkitkats/pseuds/america_oreosandkitkats
Summary: As the Iron Curtain falls across Europe, Erzsébet, the Nation State of Hungary, struggles with losses and loneliness. When an old friend suddenly returns into her life, she must grapple with the push and pull of the two dueling souls that abide in her heart.[rating will increase as the chapters progress][thesis hiatus]





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To be a Nation meant many things, but most of the time, it simply meant to be completely and profoundly lonely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahh, I tried. I really tried to do some HTML finangling on that pic, but I just can't figure it out. If anyone has any knowledge on AO3 html/css editing, much would be obliged.
> 
> In any case! Yay! Fan art!
> 
> I've commissioned my friend Mayya (give her a follow here!) to do some artwork for each chapter of the story. She's an all around great person, and I'm so happy to be working with her on this project! I think it really adds to the mood, don't you? :D

_At death we are resolved to our elements — C.S. Lewis_

 

-1955-

 

It was just after six, so the arched hallways of the Parliament corridors echoed with the chatter of civil servants rushing to get home after a long day’s work. They scrambled to pull heavy coats over suits and dresses; they struggled with caps and scarves, some faded with time and use. Amber lights glowed from hanging lamps and glinted off the polished marbled columns, colored green; scarlet colored carpets muffled the sounds of steps. In spite of its gold trim, mahogany wood paneling and intricate ceiling paintings, the hall was enveloped in a welcoming sheet of familiar comfort.

Erzsébet found herself among them, strolling down the corridor with one of the Ministry of Agriculture’s newest hire, a young man named Iszák. The staffer was so new, in fact, that he hadn’t the foggiest idea of who she was—or rather _what_ she was—so she gladly accepted his offer for conversation (“How long have you been working here?” after he had asked her the direction of the east wing exit). Settling into her role as a civilian, a simple bureaucrat without the pomp of her title or circumstance, was a rare, if not giddy, occasion.

Iszák spoke to her as plainly as he dressed, which was quite plain: a white shirt, slightly wrinkled around the middle and back; a tie, pale green, to match his eyes; brown slacks, which hung a bit too long; a coat that trailed his knees, the same color and texture as pinecones. She learned that he had just finished school and earned high distinctions in Russian, that by the end of the month, he’d be married to a wonderful woman named Katalin. He hadn’t mentioned that his family was from a village in the east, but she could hear it in the soft lilt of his voice.

Once they reached the east wing exit, Erzsébet pushed in the metal bar and opened it.

The winter air greeted them sharply. February had just given way to March, and the wind off the still-frozen Danube was frightfully cold. Iszák swore and laughed, because what else can a person do when the mercury hovered somewhere over negative two degrees centigrade? The bristling air smelled of exhaust and tobacco and snow, though snow wasn’t in the forecast until the end of the week. The sun had dipped behind the horizon an hour ago, but the thick, pillow-like clouds still held their pale lilac and rose color.

Erzsébet adjusted her fur-lined hat and buried her chin into her scarf. She hugged her arms closer around her chest as they began to walk. It had taken her almost three years to save up for this coat, but already its elbows were threadbare.

They walked past stragglers who leaned on the stone pillars and smoked cigarettes. Some held small cups of coffee or tea, freshly brewed in the cafeteria downstairs. Others crowded against each other for warmth, shoulders almost touching as they made their way down the great stone steps onto the street in search of a trolley or tram.

With all its lights on, the building, shaped from memories of Gothic dreams and ancient domes, glittered on the Danube like a pearl. A red star sat atop its highest spire like a beacon.

Erzsébet and Iszák followed the river away from the white and red Parliament building; they passed a small group of Soviets, dressed in their army fatigues. One tipped his cap at her and bade her good evening. They dotted the street, the city, like flecks of bean in a vanilla swirl.

“What is _your_ favorite food, Miss Héderváry?”

Erzsébet’s attention abruptly snapped back to Iszák, who looked at her curiously with a gentle smile.

Erzsébet pursed her lips and pondered for a moment. There were so many to wonderful treats to choose from, but her thoughts lingered on Vienna, where she had spent a considerable portion of her adult life. The answer came to her. “Lemon curd,” she replied. She ran her tongue over her palette, as if she could taste the memory: buttery crusts, heavy custard, citrus zest.

Iszák whistled, low and long. “That’s a mighty fancy dish there.”

“My husband used to make them for me,” she clarified.

“Used to?” Iszák rose a brow.

Many had died in the war, but Roderich was not one of them. She waved her hand, dismissing Iszák’s concern. “We’re divorced. It was mutual.”

“Did you have children together?” he asked.

Erzsébet shook her head, though a small part of her wanted to laugh. Roderich was not a cold man by any means, but rather distant. He wore introversion the way others wear worn-in shoes, comfortably. Such discomfort with people made him particularly abrasive around children; certainly he had no patience for little Feliciano or Heinrich.

Sick and ailing Heinrich was not under their watch, though he was at their palace in Vienna, chasing Feliciano through the gardens enough that he might as well have been. Feliciano was not theirs either. Not in the way Iszák thought.

Here, she did stifle a snicker, because goodness, what a disaster the world would have been if they could conceive as the people they represented could.

There was no official name for those like her and Roderich, like Heinrich and Feliciano, though by the middle of the nineteenth century, they had been referred to as Nation States; before then and rarely now, they were called avatars. Regardless of their titles, they were the physical, living embodiment of their people, culture, and land. They adhered to the word of their governments and moved to the will of their people. What happened to them tended to affect the mood and sentiment of the broader country.

Roderich lived as the Nation of Austria. Feliciano stood as the upper states of Italy while Heinrich represented the Holy Roman Empire. Erzsébet? She was the soul of Hungary.

Some days, she thought she missed Roderich. There was affection weaved into the way he fussed over her dress before they appeared before court; a quiet endearment when they discussed matters of the state. He would blush when she mussed his hair and teased him, and at one time that sent a thrill through her. Sometimes, during the rare meal they ate in private, he would reach across the table and take her hand and trail his thumb over her fingers, lingering over her wedding band. But, when the past fell away and she was left in her own home and to her own devices, Erzsébet found that what she missed was not him but the comfort of his _home_ and the abundance of his _food_. The absence of a ring on her finger left her with no deep-seated, forlorn feelings. It had always been, above all, a marriage of convenience.

“Did you always want to work in politics?” Iszák asked, returning her the moment. They turned a cobble-stoned corner.

Erzsébet shrugged and answered as truthfully as she could, “You can say that I didn’t have much of a choice.” She pushed a stray lock of hair behind her ear and tried to ignore his expression of concern. “What about you?”

“I did, actually,” he admitted. “I just wish someone had told me how tedious it can be.”

“What, did you think you would be discussing grand theories and philosophies all day? Moving and shaking the world, oh dreamer of dreams?”

He smirked and kicked an errant pebble to the side. “I thought I would do more than run notes between Ministers and write memos.”

She clicked the roof of her mouth. “Oh, you poor dear. You bought the lie.”

He laughed. “I would much rather do this work in the capital though,” he continued. “My cousin, Kolos, is on a village council, and it sounds like an absolute nightmare.” Iszák scoffed and shook his head.

“Where?” Erzsébet asked.

“Ágostan. It’s up north in the middle of nowhere. _Maybe_ four hundred people live there. Maybe. And they’re all old.”

She quirked her eyebrow. “What is he doing up there?”

Iszák shrugged. “That’s where my aunt and uncle ended up after the Siege. They knew some folks and just never made it down here again.”

They approached the park where Iszák’s tram stop lay. A horde of strangers, under the finger-like branches of the bare oak tree, curled in on themselves against the wind and waited for the tram, too. Erzsébet’s fingers twitched as the bitter air whipped against her naked hands.

It was then, when she reached inside her satchel and found nothing but her wallet and folders, that she realized she had left her gloves on her desk. She muttered and swore, and it caught the attention of an older, scarf-draped woman, who looked at her sternly. Erzsébet muttered her apologies.

Iszák offered his gloves, but she declined.

The orange and white tram rumbled its way down the road, ringing its bell.

“You know,” Iszák started. “A couple of us are going to the bar after work tomorrow—that one with the red door on Visegrádi—if you wanted to stop by.”

The tram approached, washing them in bright, almost white light and warm exhaust.

“I’ll consider it,” she said. “Thank you.”

He smiled at that, broad and beaming, and Erzsébet found that she was rather charmed by this young, new staffer. But then again, she tended to like all those who considered themselves Hungarian, and they, in turn, tended to like her.

Iszák stepped aboard. The light and the crowd of Pestis on their way home from work swallowed him up. His figure appeared in the back window, which he opened. He waved and hollered, “Until tomorrow, Miss Héderváry!”

Her smile didn’t fade until the tram pulled away from the corner, and she was in the dark and freezing. Any remaining heat from the vehicle had dissipated like steam from an old kettle.

Several cars whirred by. There weren’t many pedestrians out, but those who were seemed to travel in groups, huddled together for warmth and companionship. Across the street, a couple walked arm in arm, dressed in dark coats. A small child ran ahead of them, crying out the babbled nonsense of children as her pigtails flapped in the wind. The mother called for the child to come back but nestled closer to the man. The adults continued their conversation, lost in their own little world of day-to-day necessities.

Coming up behind Erzsébet, a group of four girls occupied nearly the entire sidewalk. They gossiped and giggled about school and boys and where their parents were taking them when winter broke and spring was awakened once more.

People started to congregate at the tram stop again. Their chatter was small and inconsequential: about the weather, about hockey, about the rising price of bread.

Hunger clawed at Erzsébet’s stomach, but there was an ache in her chest too—a hollow feeling, like a shell washed up on shore and abandoned long since by its inhabitant.

Erzsébet sighed, burying her hands in her pockets and kicking a stray pebble to the side. To be a Nation meant many things, but most of the time, it simply meant to be completely and profoundly lonely. Shivering slightly, she cast her eyes on the ground, turned on her heel, and ambled toward the metro.

 

 

Erzsébet lived on the fourth floor of a faceless concrete apartment project on Bajza utca, about a ten minute walk from the metro station. It had been her intention to go straight home, throw something together for dinner from whatever she could find in her cupboard, and read one of the two dozen books Ivan had sent her over the past month. But as she made the familiar trek down the road, she noticed a line had formed in front of the grocer’s. There was no telling what was on the other end of the line or if anything would remain when she reached the front, just that its very presence meant the possibility of food. She didn’t have the luxury to turn away, so she adjusted her satchel on her shoulder and settled at its end.

She rubbed her cracked hands together and blew into her numb fingers and palms. The plume of grey breath escaping her chapped lips reminded her, slightly, of smoke coming off bogrács. Erzsébet remembered her childhood as others do—fondly, with a slight curl of bitterness for its passing on the end. A memory tickled the back of her mind and settled over her, thick as a blanket and warm as the afternoon sun. 

 

 

_In those days, there was not much to be had in the village along the Danube. The land was flat, but fertile, and it was a good place for the horses to run. It was home. She was small then, all grass stains and scraped knees and hair cut short like a boy’s. She remembered the breezes, heavy with summer and fragrance, threading through her hair._

_Erzsébet had known, even before then, that she was different from the other villagers. She knew the same way she knew if the skies held either rain or hail. If the villagers’ sentiments were pale and pink, hers were a deep and bleeding scarlet. When goods and coins were hard to come by, illness and fatigue wrecked her body. When the army was strong, she felt equally as powerful. The kinship she felt among the villagers ran far deeper than anyone else’s: her joy for new life and her sorrow for passing life tenfold. The term_ a mienk _—ours—was as intoxicating as wine._

_Her imagination wasn’t caught by the frivolities that enrapture children. She dreamed of driving stakes into the ruddy earth and into men from distant lands who dared to cross her borders. She dreamed of expansion, of growing (because there had to be a reason why she was still a child even though all the boys and girls of her village had grown tall and strong with time). And she longed to find others who felt the same way._

_The air was heady with cheer and meats sizzling on large, shallow copper basins held over a crackling flame. The late afternoon sun was hot on the back of her neck. A cluster of women stood over these bogrács and chatted among themselves about trivial matters. Erzsébet wrapped her arm around a post and kept her distance. She just wanted to watch._

_One woman, with rosy cheeks and silver hair threaded with streaks of brown, wore a white flower tucked behind her ear. When she heard one of her companions toss out a playful quip, she threw her head back and laughed, deep and rich. The sound brought a tender glow to Erzsébet’s chest and a soft smile to her lips. The same woman pulled out a jar of wine and poured its contents over the meats, which hissed and popped in response. A cloud of white smoke rose, filling the grassy fields with an earthy scent. She threw in a handful of rusty-colored paprika into the mix and stirred._

_The smell of freshly-spiced meat was potent enough to make Erzsébet’s mouth water. She licked her lips in anticipation._

_The woman took notice that she and her group were being watched, her eyes locking onto the curious girl hiding from her. Erzsébet froze and tried to pull herself into the shadows, to disappear among the crowds. Instead of reprimanding her though, the woman motioned for Erzsébet to join them. After a moment’s hesitation, the imp shuffled towards the circle of women. The happiness that blossomed inside was enough to make her little heart burst._

_Erzsébet could not remember the name of this woman. She could not remember why, among the other villagers, it was her who made her young heart soar. All she could remember of this interaction was that the woman had taken her sweet-smelling flower and tucked it behind Erzsébet’s ear._

_“It suits you,_ bogárkám _,” she had complimented, cupping her chin with one hand and nuzzling their noses. There was incredible tenderness in her action and demeanor, but the woman’s eyes belied a deep and terrible sorrow._

 

 

A horn blared, pulling Erzsébet from her reverie.

The line had not moved still, and the wind was as frigid as ever.

A young woman stood in front of Erzsébet, smartly dressed with ruffled auburn hair that flitted from under her red cap. She struck Erzsébet as the type who kept impeccable notes during Party meetings and who kept those files organized by color. Erzsébet tapped her shoulder.

The woman turned. Her face was round, cheeks red from the evening chill, and her eyes were large, brown and watery. Fine lines fell around her mouth and the corners of her eyes, though they seemed ten years premature. She smelled like Belomorkanal cigarettes.

“What are we waiting for?” Erzsébet asked.

The woman sighed before answering. “Potatoes. Cabbage, maybe. The usual.” Her voice sounded airy but tired. “I think I heard something about a shipment of lemons from China.”

Erzsébet rose her eyebrows. “Lemons? In the middle of March?”

“Such is the miracle of the Soviet engineering,” the woman muttered.

Her sarcasm made Erzsébet grin. “You don’t sound very impressed, Comrade,” she responded with irony.

The woman shrugged again and huffed, “It’s an achievement, to be sure.”

A stretch of quiet overcame them. Erzsébet sorted through her mind for questions to ask her, little prompts that would dispel the awkward silence and discomfort (and there was an underlying pluck of sincerity that was curious about her constituent). But, before she could get a word out, the woman fished out a case of the Soviet cigarettes she smelled like and offered her one.

Erzsébet gladly accepted. Her supply had dwindled to the point where she left her pack at home, lest she be tempted to burn them up during her work hours.

The woman flicked on her lighter, and Erzsébet dipped to meet the flame, taking a few drags to get the cigarette going. Even though the tobacco was stale, warmth pooled in her chest and for a second, the cold was bearable.

The woman puffed out a line of grey smoke from the corner of her mouth. She narrowed her eyes and set her jaw. They remained silent for some time.

Erzsébet tapped off a bit of ash. “I’m just making conversation. I’m not with the police…”

“Juliana,” the woman introduced herself tersely.

“Juliana,” Erzsébet repeated. “Besides, if I was, you would have already been whisked away for your sarcasm.”

The hiss of Juliana’s cigarette was all her reply.

A car honked its horn from across the street. The light changed, and the crowd of people on one street crossed it.

Erzsébet thanked Juliana for the cigarette and finished it in silence. With each drag, the tip grew bright for a moment, burning a new piece of tobacco and herbs. She exhaled the smoke through her nose and wondered how many people close to Juliana had been burned up by the AVO, their secret police.

She felt the disappearances like tar sliding into her joints. The police were hers too, so they could never sneak up on her, not really. She could feel them in the shadows, watching her, the way she felt the air pressure change on the metro platform when the train arrived. She wanted to grab them by their shoulders and shake them until she knocked sense into them or their necks snapped. _They’re your people too_ , she wanted to scream. _You’re killing them. You’re killing_ me _._

But in the end, she was just as powerless as the people who fell into the shadows. There was nothing she could do to make their situation less dire. So with set jaws and furrowed brows, she kept her mouth shut, and her rage quelled.

The line stepped forward.

 

 

The central heating clunked along from inside the walls of the small produce vendor, but it ought to have been shut off. The sheer amount of people crammed inside the store was enough to bring back memories of mid-July. There wasn’t enough room for her to wriggle out of her jacket, let alone make her way to the clerk hawking out the lemons. A sheen of sweat broke out on Erzsébet’s forehead as she pushed her way towards the imports.

When she finally reached the front of the masses, only one lemon remained.

It was small, about the size of her palm, and misshapen. Its skin was thick and rough, and the color dull, as if it had faded in the hot Chinese sun. A small stem was still attached with a single, pathetic dry leaf that had curled in on itself. Erzsébet’s heart fluttered as she imagined slicing and squeezing the fruit. She could almost feel its juice running down her wrist and stinging the small, unseen cuts in her fingers. She licked her bottom lip, and her stomach growled. She reached for the fruit.

But then it wasn’t there.

Erzsébet blinked and gaped. She looked to her left and then to her right for the culprit who robbed her, as though identifying them would make a difference. The clerk climbed on a stool and declared to the rest of the store’s patrons that all of the lemons had been taken, which naturally elicited a chorus of groans and complaints. “We don’t know when the next batch is coming in,” the clerk announced. “Maybe next Tuesday.”

From across the way, she caught the eye of Juliana. She shrugged, an apology of some sort, and looked away as she pocketed the fruit. Erzsébet yelled after her and tried to squeeze through the crowd to catch up. But Juliana, with her auburn hair and red cap, was nowhere to be found. She had disappeared as quickly as she had yanked that lemon.

Disappointment slid over Erzsébet’s shoulders, heavier than her coat. It left a bitter taste in her mouth. Like that of a lemon rind.

  

 

Snow was falling in thick, defiant chunks as Erzsébet finally made her way out of the grocer’s. White flakes landed on her shoulders and down the spot on her neck where her scarf did not reach—which caused Erzsébet to cry out and swear. She readjusted her scarf so that it covered her nose, chin, and cheeks. She braced herself against the wind and shuffled home.

Erzsébet lived on the west wing of the apartment complex, in room 476. Of her neighbors along the musty hall, she had met two of them: a newly-wed couple with the bride’s mother and an infant not yet six months old in 478; an aging professor, who taught astronomy at the university, and his wife in 476. Across the hall, 477 stood empty, having been cleared out a few months ago, by a family whose last hope, their son the engineer, dropped out a year into his studies. 475 was occupied by a man she only knew by idiosyncrasy—a painter, who blared Radio Budapest from dawn until dusk. He would turn it up louder, somehow, during the songs of Aram Khachaturian.

She was certain that at least two of her neighbors were hired to keep their eyes on her, though, she wasn’t sure if those eyes were for the Soviet state or her own.

As she trudged up the stairs, the smell of turpentine was palpable as always.

The living arrangement was not her idea, but Ivan’s. She had been so cold and hungry and dazed after the war. Everything felt distant and murky, as though she were looking at it through a darkened well. A team of advisors had come down from Moscow with Ivan—the Nation State of Russia—in tow.

“If you truly represent the people of Hungary,” he had explained, “then it is only fair that you should live as they do.” There was a sense of callous (almost twisted, even) satisfaction laced into his smile. Erzsébet had always suspected that his dislike of her went deeper than simple statecraft.

Fishing her keys from her satchel proved to be a most difficult task with half-frozen, unfeeling fingers. She dropped them, groaned and swore as she retrieved them. When she stood again, she paused.

She rested her head on the cold door and took a deep breath, counting to ten. A thought came to her, a small consideration at first but a sentiment that grew and soothed her irritation. There were children who were seeing snow for the first time tonight. They were hers too, those little ones who only knew life like this, behind the bleak Iron Curtain. They were too young, though, their hopes and desires just on the edge of her intuition. But there were older ones whose frustration and indignation she _could_ feel—and they demanded change. The thought made her stomach churn.

She shook her head and sighed. She gave her key a twist and opened the door.

Her apartment was exactly forty-six meters square, a little longer than it was squat, and had three rooms: a bathroom, kitchen, living space, and a small foyer to connect them all. The door to the kitchen, she kept propped open with a potted plant; the door to her living space with an old shoe in the jamb.

Erzsébet hung her coat, hat, scarf, and bag on the hooks she had drilled into the wall. She stood in the doorway to her living space and took off her shoes; she slowly let her heels touch the ground. A pleasant ache radiated up her calves and into her thighs, and she sighed with content. She wiggled her toes, free for the first time since she pulled her shoes off under her desk that afternoon. The next to come off was the hose, which she unclasped and threw on top of her pumps. Finally, the bobby pins which held her chestnut hair in a chingon.

She slipped on a pair of soft, but worn house shoes and tread her way into the kitchen. The floorboards creaked with each step. Her young neighbors were quiet, and the painter across the way had decided nine in the evening was as good as anytime to hang up his brushes. It wasn’t every day that her home was serene; Erzsébet didn’t even need a cigarette tonight. She would savor the silence.  
  
When Erzsébet stood in her kitchen and let her arms rest akimbo, she felt as though her elbows would touch the walls. In the right corner sat a small metal table that wobbled a bit and an old chair whose cushion had worn out long ago. She had so few visitors, so few reasons for bringing people across her threshold that she hadn’t even bothered buying a second seat.

A large sink sat under a window draped with cream-colored curtains, whose sill housed a small batch of herbs. The wall, where the spigot snaked from, was plastered with rust and hard water stains that refused to come out, no matter how hard she scrubbed. Next to that stood a small wooden table with little functioning counter space, and on the adjacent wall, an oven-range and refrigerator that wasn’t quite cold enough for her beers.

Erzsébet pulled out a block of cheese and a link of kolbász wrapped in paper from the fridge. She cut the former into two strips, enough to cover a slice of black, hearty bread; the latter, she sliced thinly and placed many layers atop the cheese. She did the same for the other slice of bread. _A voilà_. Dinner.

While she waited for her tea water to boil, she searched for a book from her shelf. Her fingers flittered across titles and spines until she landed on one Ivan had sent her: three hundred and fifty pages of essays analyzing the almost fifty year old revolution. It was a newer book and something quite likely to be brought up during Party meetings.

The thought from earlier curled around the back of her mind like a vine as she continued to read. _This isn’t right_ , it urged. _This isn’t right, and it must be changed._ She would have poured herself a glass of wine to smother the voice had she not drained her supply of it two weeks ago. She went back to the page and read until she finished the second chapter and her sandwich and tea.

Erzsébet took her plate to the deep-basin sink and washed it. She checked on her herbs in the window sill and sprinkled some water on them. Now if only she could afford the lamb that would complement the rosemary so well. Her stomach still felt empty, so she ate another piece of bread as she watched the snow fall outside.

It was coming down much harder now, and little piles of white were already starting to form on the sidewalks. A little smile crossed her lips. Erzsébet had always loved the snow. Even as a child, she adored the way it powdered the earth like some kind of magic. Roderich despised it; Miloš, Croatia, found it irritating; Gilbert—

Well. She patted the crumbs off her hands in the sink. That was enough for the night.

She felt a crick form in her neck as she stepped into the living space. She rubbed the area as she pulled the cushions off the sofa. Then, she pulled her bed from its casement. While she prepared herself for bed, she wondered if there would be enough snow on the streets for her boss to forgive an hour’s delay. Or an absence all together. It had been a while since she had taken a personal day; she could blame it on a sluggish economy. It wouldn’t be a complete lie after all. If she were being completely honest with herself (and Erzsébet was in the habit of not lying to herself), it had been decades, maybe even centuries, since she had been completely healthy. She had just become quite good at working within the bounds of her discomfort.

Or maybe nothing would happen. Maybe she would wake up at five as she always did and would go to work, leave for home at six, read one of Ivan’s books, eat whatever morsels of food she had at her disposal, and prepare to do it all over again. Maybe tomorrow would be incredibly, painfully ordinary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone! I'm so glad that you're here! 
> 
> This has been a long time coming, and if you've been [following me on Tumblr](america-oreosandkitkats.tumblr.com), listening to me gripe about the writing process, thank you _so, so_ much for sticking it out and joining me here. And if you don't follow me, and you've happened to stumble on this little nugget, thanks for giving it a shot! (and you should totally follow me on the tumbls).
> 
> I also need to give a huge, huge, huge shoutout to my beta, Miranda (who is [here](221bdisneystreet.tumblr.com) on the Tumbls). Miranda's encouragement is actually the whole reason why this fic even exists. She's been with me through the ups and downs of this fic, despite not really being in the APH fandom herself! This fic would be nothing without her, so send her lots of love as well. :)
> 
> If you liked it, I would appreciate a kudo or a comment! This is kind of been my baby since early June, so any feedback would be wonderful!
> 
> Here's the thing about me and Hetalia. I put the canon in a box, I set that box on fire and I write my fics to the burning embers' glow. I am using my own sort of construction for the Nation States and their relationships with one another and their people. Because I'm doing that, though, I'm trying to write this as though you were coming into the fandom stone cold.
> 
> I also need to stress that I...really don't know a whole lot about Hungary or Hungarian history! I am a simple American who is doing her best regarding a region we don't really talk a lot about in school. For now, the majority of what I've read about pre-1956 Hungarian Revolution history comes from [ James Michener's _The Bridge at Andau_](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bridge-at-Andau-James-Michener/dp/0812986741) as well as [ Tony Judt's _Postwar: A History of Eruope Since 1945_](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Postwar-History-Europe-Since-1945/dp/009954203X).
> 
> That being said, if _you_ know more about the region or it's history and you're getting some major red flags on my end, please let me know! I will do my best to fix any mistakes or misconceptions.
> 
> As you can see, these chapters are going to be quite long. I'm still working on Chapter 4, though I'm almost done. Because of their length, and because of the sheer amount of work my Master's program is demanding of me, I will try to keep a monthly update schedule. I have some ideas for one shots that operate with the same logic and construction as this one, so I might be doing smaller 3-5k stories in the meantime.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The girl who hardly spoke had something to say then. Her words were muffled in the folds of Erzsébet’s clothes, but the Nation could make them out.
> 
> “Don’t go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating has gone up. This is the World War II flashback chapter.
> 
> Content warnings for: war imagery, some upsetting imagery regarding kids and Nazis. If anything else strikes you as needing a flag and a tag, let me know

She dreamed of fire: tongues of red and white and orange feeding a voracious stomach. She could do nothing but let those fiery teeth sink into her. She could do nothing until there was nothing left but ash as smooth as skin, ash as black as night.

When the war was over, she had fallen to her knees into a patch of soil. The weightlessness of relief was almost as heavy as the burden of conflict; the silent streets almost as loud as the shells’ booming thunder. It had brought stinging tears to her eyes, though she did not shed them. She pulled off her tattered gloves one finger at a time. Her hands were cracked, raw, and red; they ached in the cold wind. With trembling lips and trembling hands, she had reached out and grasped a handful of earth. It was dark, stained with either blood or oil, and soft. She ran her thumb over the dirt and watched the excess sift between her fingers.

It was like holding a mirror up to another and watching the unending row of green glass rooms appear, like trying to find the centerpoint of infinity. She held the earth. Her earth. Her. And brought it close to her heart and shuddered out a breath. It was over—all of it—and somehow she had survived. She had died at least a half-dozen times, but the soil was still here, though it should have been cinders.

There would be a time for celebration and there would be a time for mourning, but this was a moment of pause.

The Germans had come with the breaking of spring—that was one fire. And then as winter closed around the year’s end, so too did the Soviets close their fist around the capital. Another. And now they were teaching schoolchildren that that insatiable blaze, the siege, had only lasted fifty days— _only_ —as if the Red Army had been merciful. They should count themselves among the lucky, those poor bastard Hungarians, that the siege did not rage as long or as fiercely as Leningrad’s. No one had resorted to eating their dead children.

But Erzsébet had never been in the business of comparing scars. They all had scars and broken bones that didn’t heal quite right.

 

 

-1945-

The cellar was hardly three meters diagonally, yet somehow, thirty two people managed to squeeze in there: five families, with four toddlers and two infants between them. They came here because their homes had been destroyed and Mrs. Sipos, who owned the red-painted house and cellar, wasn’t in the habit of turning away strangers during peacetime, let alone while armed soldiers roamed the streets and planes droned overhead. The house’s only two habitable rooms had been filled by her daughters and sons and their own families. It was safer in the cellar anyway—practically shell proof and theoretically bomb proof.

The Turks had carved this place out and laid the heavy stone walls and rafters in the sixteenth century, after they stormed across the basin and claimed her land as theirs. The memory of crawling into caves to hide from Sadiq and his hoards made Erzsébet’s skin itch, like something had rotted just beneath the surface.

When the year had turned and the Soviets came, a squad of them made camp in an abandoned, bombed out apartment complex almost four kilometers south of the cellar. Nine days ago, a few Hungarian soldiers helped a German outfit set up in a hostel where students stayed while studying at the university, five kilometers north of the cellar. Surprisingly, the hostel hadn’t crumbled; it hardly sustained damage at all. The only sign of the war were the blown out windows and a few divots in its face. While its impeccable structure was a perk, the most advantageous part of the hostel were the kitchens on the ground level: shelves and cartons surely stocked with cans of soups and vegetables.

Though Buda twisted and turned on rolling hills, here, the Germans and their Hungarian allies only had an advantage of about five degrees. All day, the Soviets and the Germans fired at each other from darkened windows and behind large slabs of rubble. Their rifles echoed and cracked the air and bones. Once, a soldier lobbed a grenade, and it plunked atop a tank. It rolled down the side and fell into the tracks which wrapped around the wheels. The explosion made them cover their ears and the cellar walls rumbled.

Melted ice and snow slid in through the rafters and dripped into large puddles, the rhythmic sound not dissimilar to that of a ticking seconds hand, winding its way around the hours. The air was hot and stale and smelled of musty bodies and reeking clothes. Woven into the pungent odor was a thread of spoiled potatoes that sometimes made Erzesébet gag. Light filtered into their hole from a single pane of glass fixed on the door at the top of the sagging, soggy stairs.

They had been there for exactly fifteen days and twenty three hours. When the sun set (and it would soon), it would mark sixteen days.

Erzsébet sat with her back to a damp wall with her knees tucked high by her chin, as did most of her companions, with the exception of the munitions factory worker, István. He stood against the wall with his arms crossed, moving his foot in small circles to keep the swelling down.

Her head was light, attention foggy and unfocused. The hollow feeling that had crawled around her stomach, like spiders in the dusty corners of attics, seemed to have slithered into her bones and settled in her blood. She was as much Hunger as she was _Erzsébet_ or even _Magyar Királyság_. When she closed her eyes, she thought of blood trickling from the breasts of freshly slaughtered chickens. She ran her tongue over her dry, cracking lips.

Erzsébet rubbed shoulders with a man named Otto, who studied philosophy. Those who sought a middling way between communism and fascism, or something new altogether, found themselves on the top of a very long list of those who ought not to be. He hid now, less for his written opinions on Marx, and more because roving teams of the Arrow Cross snatched boys and men and sent them to Poland. Women and their children could plug up holes in buildings like rags, but battles needed men and tank cannons needed fodder.

It was an understatement to say that Erzsébet wasn’t ready for the war.

Otto’s wife, Anna, sat on the other side of the room. She once trained to sing and act in the theater before she met and married the fugitive philosopher and gave him three children. She held one of them in her arms and across her lap. Róza was hardly seven years old. Her eyelids and head were heavy with lethargy; her forehead was wet, and her cheeks were red with fever. As the girl coughed, Anna rocked Róza and sang to her because there was nothing else to give. Though Anna’s voice was as worn as a rust, her melody was as soothing as a serene countryside breeze.

Their son, Simon, five and capricious, tugged on his mother’s sleeve and whined softly that he wanted food. Anna didn’t turn to face him. Instead, she replied, quite simply, “There isn’t any,” as if she were telling him the train was running late.

Erzsébet’s fingers twitched, and her expression hardened.

One of the infants stirred in his father’s arms and mewed. Without much regard to his son, he stared, as if transfixed by something beyond the cellar wall. Erzsébet could tell that there had been a softness to his father, Zoltán; it was in his eyes, brown like polished topaz. When this was all over (a tiny voice at the base of her being whispered _if_ ), it wouldn’t matter how much he scrubbed the dirt caked into the wrinkles of his face.

They had melted all the snow they could for washing and drinking and little snow had fallen since to replace it. So, when Mrs. Sipos had told them she had heard about spigots in Zsigmond Square that hadn’t been shut off, a band of women came together to fetch it out. One of those women had been Zoltán’s wife, Margaréta. The Square, seemingly because of or in spite of the water, brought the deathly attention of the Germans and the Soviets. Even if they had the provisions to conduct a funeral, there wasn’t enough of the small, blonde woman left to bury.

Erzesébet’s heart broke for the infant, whose name she thought was Gazsi. He would only know a father carved from stone, forged from steel.

It brought Erzsébet to her feet.

Hunger blotted the edge of her vision in black. It made her heart race and knees shake so badly that she needed the rough wall to steady herself. Her arms remembered the weight of steel swords, and her legs remembered the strain of snapping jaws under leather boots. Shame, sharp as bullets and hot as their shells, riddled her chest. She stifled the laugh rattling in her ribs. She might as well have been human.

Only a few heads looked up at her. Their faces had grown so pale and the shrouds under their eyes so dark that their irises practically glowed in the soft, dimming light. They waited for her to speak or to do something that warranted their attention. In their hesitant silence, little Jószi, who would turn three in the summer, babbled.

“I’m going out for food,” Erzsébet rasped. She grimaced at the sound of her own weak voice.

Upon hearing _food_ , several other faces perked up. Whether their expressions held anticipation or apprehension though, Erzsébet couldn’t tell. Maybe it was something in between.

Cili, having only turned one just prior to the Soviets’ arrival, broke into sobs which shook her shoulders. Gazsi stirred from his sleep and followed suit. Ezsti gathered her daughter into her arms and tried to placate the hungry child. Larisa, one of the silver-haired women, scooped Gazsi from Zoltán, and the tiny boy’s cries became muffled in her shoulder.

Petra was young, not even old enough to study at the university. She shook her head, plaits twitching. Her coin-colored eyes were as wide as a 20 filler and shone with fear. “Miss Héderváry, you can’t!” she squeaked. “The curfew!”

Sparks of indignation raced across Erzsébet’s nerves. It consumed her shame until there was nothing left but fervid righteousness that tingled and burned in her cheeks. She wanted to bare her teeth like an animal and snarl, _let them come for me then_ , but her response caught in her throat like a string caught on an errant nail. Erzsébet pressed her lips together and stepped off the wall.

But hunger had carved the usefulness out of her legs, too. She stumbled.

A few hands flew out to help her, though she wished that they hadn’t. It was as though her skin had been pulled back, her pride flayed. Shame crept back into her crevices like waves lapping on the shore.

Before anyone could ask otherwise, she sighed, “I’m fine.” She tugged at her wrinkled and stained blouse and brushed the folds in her skirt.

Luca was twenty and pious and, had the war not come to their city, married. Her temples were almost entirely grey, and the creases around her eyes were deep. “Where will you get it?” she asked. “The Siposes have given us everything they can spare, and we’ve exhausted everything that’s nearby.”

With a small croak, István added, “It’s No Man’s Land out there.”

Erzsébet nodded. She had seen the trenches of Lutsk. It was an apt assessment. “There might be extra reserves at the soldiers’ camp,” she said.

An anxious murmur rose within the cellar. Petra’s eyes grew wider and somehow, her face grew even paler. Ezsti protested, “That’s too far!”

Erzsébet tried to argue back, but their voices had grown into a crescendo. The commotion earned the ire of the smallest among them; the infants wailed and shrieked, and Róza’s coughing became more persistent and harsh. Erzsébet clenched her fists and almost shouted at them. She didn’t have to though.

Hajna called for Erzsébet— “Miss Héderváry!”— and it was like flour over a fire. The noise, save for the gurgling of crying children, ceased. Everyone turned their attentions to the old woman, who situated herself in the far corner of the cellar. She sat on an old mattress shoved in on itself in the shape of an _L_ , which existed only in the form of metal coils.

Hajna was nearing seventy, the oldest in their group. She kept her silver hair tied back with an embroidered white scarf, knotted under her chin in the peasant style. She had come to Buda with her son and his sons like so many others from the provinces—afraid but certain the city would be safer than their empty fields.

Back in November, her boy Lázló, who was thirty-seven and healthy, had been plucked away by the army. Only God knew where he was now or if he was even still alive. Hajna kept watch over Misi and Roman as well as she could with one eye lost to cataracts, and the teenage boys would recite the rosary with her.

“What will we do if the Russians come while you’re gone?” Hajna’s voice dragged over the vowels as the grain growers in the south do.

Erzsébet settled on the backs of her heels as whatever was left of her posturing fell by the wayside. She looked around the room at those haunted, hollow eyes. A man in his mid-fifties, with large and thick glasses named Rudi, quivered.

What would they do if she stayed?

While her presence, the soul of their nation, might have been some sort of an undercurrent of comfort to them, she still only occupied a single human body. Hunger had made her limbs weak and a cruel God had made her hands small. She bled as they did, and while death was not a permanent fixture for her and those like her, the expiration of a Nation spelled doom for their people.

Erzsébet picked at the base of her gloves as shame simmered in her belly and silenced her voice. She had no answer for them, let alone a good one. Up the stairs, the glass in the door rattled, but only with the wind. The rifles were sleeping tonight. The walls were still.

“You’re hungry,” Erzsébet said finally. It was hardly a concession. Her throat tightened around the words she could not say— _I am your_ Nation. _Let me do this for you._

Teca, ten and freckled, scrambled to her feet and dashed at Erzsébet. She wrapped her arms around her waist with such force that it almost drove the Nation back into the wall. Teca’s mother, Blanka, chided the girl and told her to give the woman some breathing space. Teca’s response was burying her face into Erzsébet’s chest further and gripping tighter. Erzsébet waved away Blanka’s apologies.

The girl who hardly spoke had something to say then. Her words were muffled in the folds of Erzsébet’s clothes, but the Nation could make them out.

“Don’t go.”

A warm and tender feeling bloomed in Erzsébet’s heart, and its intensity brought Erzsébet pause. It took her a moment to gather herself, but when she had, she slowly wrapped her free arm around the girl, returning the embrace.

Roderich had called her compassion and affection for the human children of their kingdom endearing, even a strength of her character when their marriage was happy. At the height of their mutual disdain, he had called it the thing that would drag her to a true death. She called him a heartless coward. He called her a wicked idealist.

A few nights ago, Petra brought in the morning light whispering with Teca. Everyone else had fallen asleep, but Erzsébet had been kept awake by a pulsing in her ribs (a battle, somewhere in Pest). Petra asked yes or no questions to the girl, because although Teca liked Petra most, she could not talk to her. Erzsébet learned that Petra liked French and boys with thick-rimmed glasses and romantic poetry. Teca liked arithmetic and kittens and building things.

As the larks began their morning song, Teca spoke—a miracle as profound as the Epiphany. “I want to make homes,” she whispered. “Everyone needs one. I can make ’em sturdy. Make ’em look nice.”

Erzsébet kissed the crown of the girl’s head. It had been no one’s fault that the girl, or the rest of them, had to live through this, simply the misfortune of timing. Teca deserved to leave the cellar and to speak until her voice grew hoarse. She should grow and one day build houses or apartment complexes or maybe something else entirely, because humans changed their minds all the time in their short lives. She should have years to decide.

“I won’t be gone for long,” Erzsébet murmured to the child. She felt Teca nod, and she stroked her back in small circles. Teca’s frame seemed frail, even under her massive damp coat.

Erzsébet looked to the adults. She plotted the course in her mind again, certain of its distance and the duration of her journey. “I just need…I just need two hours.”

Otto started to say something but fell victim to a coughing spell. Erzsébet’s expression and her shoulders fell. The air was so moist they could almost wring the water from it to wash; it was a small wonder that they all didn’t have pneumonia or typhoid.

“A lot can happen in two hours, Miss Héderváry,” Luca stated in a hushed, worried voice.

“I know,” Erzsébet said, and it was true. It had only taken a few well-placed minutes to catapult the world into the first Great War after all. She pushed a stray lock of hair behind her ear.

As Otto recovered, he apologized for the disturbance, which received a number of “never you mind”s from the room.

Anna slid her leg forward, trying to reach across the divide and touch her husband. But though the room was small, her toes couldn’t quite reach him. Róza wheezed in her arms, and Simon leaned on her body.

Otto gazed at his wife from across the divide fearfully. It was as though Anna was a mirage fading before his eyes, like she was a piece of china about to shatter on a hard, tile floor. Like this was the last image he would have of her before she ceased to exist.

He pulled himself away from his family and looked up to Erzsébet. “Do you have to do this tonight?” he asked.

“Yes,” Erzsébet asserted softly, definitively. Anna buried her face in her hand.

“But if you wait until morning—”

“If I wait until morning, they will _see_ me,” Erzsébet nearly hissed. Her face twisted, and her grip on Teca tightened.

“They will be less likely to shoot someone out in the daylight than running around after curfew!” Otto shouted. Anna shushed him and told him to calm down.

“In the morning they won’t _have_ to shoot me,” Erzsébet snapped.

She stole a glance at Zoltán and knew she wasn’t the only one. Had it not been for the steady up and down movement of his chest, she would have worried that the man had gone to meet his wife. Larisa still held Gazsi and cooed at him. The look she gave Erzsébet was bitter though.

Their dread was as tangible and as heavy as the stones which made up the cellar’s walls. The water from the ceiling dripped into the puddles like sands falling through an hourglass.

Anna spoke first, breaking the silence with her clear and even-toned demand. “You need to get us food,” she insisted. Her small mouth was pressed in a fine, thin line.

“But Anna—”

“No, Otto. I won’t hear anymore.” She held out her hand to quiet him.

“Be _reasonable_.”

She snapped her attention to Otto. “Your daughter is _dying_ ,” she said through bared teeth. “She needs medicine. She needs dry, warm air. She needs something to eat.” Her voice cracked on the last word; it sent a shiver down Erzsébet’s spine.

“Anna.” Otto uttered his wife’s name softly, as if he were in a chapel. “You’ve heard what they’ve said about them.”

She blanched. “If my body is harmed,” she spat, “but I still have air in my lungs, I will make due. After all of this, I can live through another tragedy.”

A weak, low moan came from Róza, and her lips twitched as though she were trying to speak. Anna pushed the girl’s auburn bangs from her blotchy face and curled the lock around her ear. She traced the side of her daughter’s face. “ _Lelkem_ ,” she whispered, or so Erzsébet thought.

When she looked back at Otto, her eyes were wide and glinted in the dim moonlight. Her chin trembled. “I can’t do this if we lose another one, Otto.” Anna blinked and gazed at the ceiling. “Mother’s aren’t…” she croaked. Her voice faded into a keen.

She sucked in a breath through her teeth, and her shoulders quivered, but she managed to keep her tears from streaming down her cheeks.

“Mothers aren’t supposed to bury their children,” she whispered. Anna covered her mouth to stifle the pained, small sound she made, and only then did she begin to cry. Róza, unresponsive, shuddered in her arms.

Otto crossed the distance between them on his knees and embraced his wife. She wept into his chest, and he murmured quiet reassurances to her.

All eyes fell on Erzsébet again.

Despite the room’s heat, a deep cold settled in Erzsébet’s veins. Her legs felt weak, and she could hardly feel Teca burying herself in her side again. She cleared her throat, but the right words remained lodged there. The room darkened, and Erzsébet was certain it wasn’t from a passing cloud.

“I-I’ll bring back everything my hands and arms will carry,” she stammered. Erzsébet’s mouth felt thick. There was a bitter, burned taste on her tongue, as if she had licked a bowl full of myrrh. Her words were soft and unsure, everything a Nation should not sound like.

She knelt before Teca, took the girl’s hand in hers, and ran her thumb over her wet, freckled cheeks. “I’m coming back, _bogárkám_ ,” she assured.

“Promise?” Teca asked.

Erzsébet nodded. “Promise.”

The girl gave Erzsébet one last tight embrace before peeling off and returning to her mother, Blanka.

Hajna rose from her place at the back of the cellar. The metal coils creaked in protest. Those who sat on the ground pushed away from her, giving the woman space to walk and meet Erzsébet in the center of the room. Erzsébet stood.

Erzsébet was a very short woman considering what she represented, and Hajna was a very tall woman considering her age; she had the Nation by a centimeter or two. She peered at Erzsébet with a curious tilt to her head and a knit in her brow, as if Erzsébet were a stray cat found trotting through the boulevard. Hajna looked as though she was about to speak but couldn’t find the right words to say.

Instead, she unfastened her scarf and pressed it into Erzsébet’s hands. It was stitched from muslin, already soft but so much more now that it had aged. Erzsébet traced the floral patterns with her thumb and reminisced briefly of wildflowers and women cooking meats in _bogrács_. Better days.

“You can carry more things in bags,” Hajna said.

Ilka and Larisa undid their scarves as well and passed them to Hajna, who gave them to Erzsébet. The scarves, at least, would keep her from using her coat to carry things. The winter winds could kill her just as easily as the shots from soldiers.

Erzsébet couldn’t quite meet them in the eye. “Thank you,” she murmured. But what she really wanted to say was, _Forgive me for putting you through this_.

Hajna grasped Erzsébet by her shoulders. Erzsébet concentrated harder on the damp, hard ground. “I know that you’re different than everyone else here,” Hajna said softly, just for her. “I can’t tell you why or how, but I know.”

Erzsébet looked up at the woman. Her stomach coiled, and her face fell into a grimace. Her eyes stung, and she tucked in her bottom lip to keep its tremble hidden.

“I pray to the Good Lord Above and to all the saints that He carry you on eagles’ wings,” Hajna whispered.

“So long as it’s not to St. Jude the Apostle,” Erzsébet replied. She pressed the heel of her wrist into the corner of her eye and sniffed. Hajna chuckled, and a weight eased from Erzsébet’s shoulders.

Hajna kissed both of Erzsébet’s cheeks. It felt less like a gesture of parting and more like a blessing.

“Just come back,” Anna pleaded.

 

 

 

Buda was a carcass: metal rods jutted from crumbled buildings like bones, roofs were open like sores, and the quiet that settled over the city felt like that of a gravesite. Rubble gathered at the base of buildings and fell into broken, chopped up roads. The stars above glittered like shards of shattered glass. Moonlight spilled over the city.

Erzsébet will forget many details about the war as time passes, but the stench of rotting corpses clogging her city, German and Hungarian, Russian and Romanian alike, is not one of those details. It had seeped into her clothes, into her hair, and into her skin. Despite all the things she had done in her long life in the name of her National Sovereignty, the smell of people dying always made her retch.

The debris and snow crunched under her boots as she trotted from shadow to shadow. Once, she slipped on a patch of ice hidden under the snow, but righted herself before falling. The second time that happened, a block and a half up, she wasn’t so lucky. Her feet went straight under her, her face went for the dirt, and her left wrist landed on a jagged edge of pavement, cracking the face of the watch Rudi had given her. The only sound in the black, still night was of her swearing not quite as under her breath as she would have liked.

After a moment, Erzsébet picked herself up and brushed the snow off her body with her good hand. She took off the watch, grimaced at its damage, and pocketed it. Her left hand pulsed to the rhythm of her heart, and every finger twitch sent jolts up to her elbow. She swore again, quieter this time, as she scooped up a handful of snow and pressed it to the spot. Though the snow’s burn felt nice, the tender spot on her wrist would surely swell tonight.

When the snow melted and her wrist was numb, Erzsébet shook off the excess water and replaced the watch on her right hand. Even though the band was too big and the watch hung on her wrist like a bangle, her skin tickled where the watch lay its unfamiliar weight. She tried to ignore the sensation as she hiked up her skirt. She would have to run to make up for lost time. “Two hours and not a minute longer,” she had promised.

She would like to have said that she made it a full kilometer before needing to stop for a break. Her legs slowed to a brisk walk as her vision started to blur, and the pinch in her side became more like an iron poker. Her poorly adjusted skirt fell back to the ground.

Her pace fell to something that couldn’t even be called a bramble when she approached a building that might have been a store at one time. Its roof was still attached, but there was a quiet and stillness about it that told Erzsébet that it had been long abandoned. She peered over her shoulders and down the narrow back alleys and paused for a few breaths on each side. Nothing.

With a sigh, she let her head hit the brick wall. The sharp, brittle air had felt nice when she first emerged from the cellar, but now the chill cut deep. She shivered, and her teeth clattered as she blew into her gloves. When she flexed her fingers, already heavy-feeling and difficult to close, she winced. An ache crept slowly across the edges of her nerves like fog across the Danube. There was a skirmish somewhere across the river and another here in Buda but somewhere up in the hills by what was once the royal palace.

What she wouldn’t do for a cigarette right now.

Erzsébet looked up into the heavens and exhaled deeply. The cloud of breath resembled that of a smoke cloud. She ran her tongue over her teeth and conjured a memory of burning tobacco and herbs. She reached a little deeper into her memories and let the sweet flavors of _shisha_ sit on her tongue.

After another moment, Erzsébet pushed herself off the wall with her hip and started again.

Rudi’s watch ticked steadily as she ran. She had left the cellar at 6:13 and approached her destination at 7:23.

She had come to the hostel one block from its back entrance, slipped behind a tall embankment of wreckage and peered around it.

According to the rumors, the squad was only thirty-one strong. From her intuition, she could assume that no more than ten were hers; the rest, Germans.

There was some activity happening at the front of the building. Motorcycles and canvas-covered Kübelwagens were parked along the boulevard. A few soldiers stood about, overlooking something on the hood of one of the cars with red-filtered flashlights. She couldn’t hear them from this distance. She could, however, hear the smattering of boys in uniforms hovering by the back entrance.

There were four of them. They kept their helmet clasps undone and their Karabiner 98K rifles slung over their shoulders. Their bulky coats and baggy, bloused pants, patterned in grey and brown splotches, made it hard to distinguish body types; their grey, wool toques, gathered around their necks despite the cold, made it hard for her to make out ranks; their helmets, which glinted in the moonlight, threw sharp shadows across their faces. She could only distinguish one—broad shouldered and tall, standing almost ten centimeters above them.

They spoke in hushed, rapid German. One sounded like he was from the outskirts of Frankfurt in the west, the others from Kiel in the north and Munich in the south. The tall one had a crisp clip to his Berlin voice. His baritone sounded so familiar that Erzsébet flinched and her eyes grew wide. She mouthed a swear and wondered what on earth was so important in Budapest that it would have prompted Ludwig’s appearance here.

The tall one dipped into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered it to his squad of three. He must have said something funny because the others laughed as they lit their sticks.

Erzsébet leaned on the rubble and closed her eyes. She breathed and listened to her body. No chill that couldn’t be accounted for by the weather ran across her skin; the hairs at the nape of her neck stayed down. Her heart did not flutter and there was no jolt in her belly. Germany wasn’t here tonight, she surmised as she released her breath. She just had to deal with humans.

Humans with guns, but humans nonetheless.

Children, really, in the larger sense of things.

Erzsébet grabbed a ball-shaped stone from the ground and hurled it like a grenade to her left and down the street. The fact that its arch only took it to the catty corner, twenty meters off, made her pout. She thought she had thrown it harder than that.

But she had thrown it hard enough for it to break in two upon striking the side of the building. The crack echoed.

The boys stopped their joking and looked in the direction of the sound. The cigarette drooped on Munich’s lip so low that Erzsébet thought it would tumble from his mouth.

She pulled the edge of her skirt close and curled deeper into the shadows.

“What was that?” Frankfurt asked.

“Not sure,” came Kiel.

“Someone should check it out,” Munich drawled. He took a drag.

“Brinkerhoff and Gehrhardt,” Berlin commanded, gesturing to Kiel and Munich. The authority with which he spoke made Erzsébet tap her forehead on the crumbling structure. She had to remind herself that the boy was _not_ Germany.

The two twisted their faces in horror. “Why not you, Metzger?” Brinkerhoff asked. “You’re stronger than all three of us combined.”

“In case it was a distraction by the Soviets.” He held the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and took another drag. “Besides, Gehrhardt’s faster. And Brinkerhoff?” He smiled here, wide and toothy, unable to contain himself from his punchline. “Your screams are so piercing the brass’ll know what’s going on before Gehrhardt can run back here.”

He snorted, which broke down into a giggle. The other two laughed with him, captivated, it seemed, by a memory. Even in the low light, Erzsébet could see the rush of red on Brinkerhoff’s face as Frankfurt jostled him in his ribs with his elbow. His helmet clattered, and the undone straps flew around his face. Brinkerhoff shoved Metzger. Erzsébet pressed her hand to her mouth to stifle her giggle.

The moment passed, and they were quiet again.

Frankfurt looked down the alleyway and licked his lips. “I’ll go with you guys,” he volunteered, jutting his chin in the direction of Brinkhoff and Gehrhardt. Metzger hummed in agreement. “We’ll check the perimeter too,” Frankfurt added.

The three of them took their rifles to their hips, ends pointed to the earth but ready to fire at will. As he watched them go, Metzger tossed his unfinished cigarette into the snowy ground—it hissed—and stepped on the light. His rifle, also kept at the ready, seemed like a toy in his large hands. He tapped a steady one-two, one-two tempo along its barrel, as though he were thinking of a march.

Erzsébet sighed and tried to keep her face neutral. She stepped away from the wall. Snow crunched under her boot as she made her way toward the alley in slow, even steps.

Metzger heard this and perked. He snapped his rifle to his shoulder, and even though she still stood in the shadows, the boy somehow managed to point its end right in between her eyes. The front wavered a bit, and she shivered.

“There’s a curfew, _Fräuline_ ,” Metzger warned. Little puffs formed by his mouth. “I’m giving you this courtesy, but only for you to stop what you’re doing and to go back where you came from.”

She disregarded his call and stepped into the light.

Metzger stood an entire half-meter taller than her. He was built like a tree: thick limbs and long angles that rooted his body in place. A sharp wind ran through the alley and tousled her hair, pushing it across her face. She curled a lock behind her ear.

Erzsébet could see the boy’s face now, and she really wished she couldn’t. Her heart grew heavy. Sure, she had watched that whelp grow up, but she hated what Ludwig had become and hated even more what he had done across the continent. To her people.

Metzger’s jawline and nose were sharp like Ludwig’s and his gaze just as piercing. But where Ludwig’s eyes always reminded Erzsébet of pale winter mornings, Metzger’s were so brown that they were almost black.

His cheeks were red from the cold and from acne; his upper lip was bare. He couldn’t have been older than nineteen.

“Wh-who are you?” the boy stuttered.

He was nineteen, and he was scared. Erzsébet was fairly certain Ludwig didn’t know how to be scared; Gilbert wouldn’t have taught him that.

Slowly, she raised her hands in surrender. He pushed the bolt action down and locked it forward. He moved his finger from the rifle’s shaft to the trigger guard. She swore internally. He asked her name again.

“My name is Elisabeth,” she answered as calmly as she could. Her name always sounded strange to her in German. “I’m looking for food.”

Metzger didn’t drop his weapon as he shook his head. “Who are you?”

Erzsébet shifted the weight on her back foot and ran her tongue over her teeth.

He adjusted the rifle, finger still resting on the trigger guard.

“I’m a civilian,” she replied in an even tone, “and I’m hungry.”

“Are you like him?”

She creased her brow. “Who?” Erzsébet asked.

“Major Beilschmidt.”

Erzsébet’s cheeks prickled and her lips twitched. She sighed through her nose. She didn’t need to know how Metzger had come in contact with Gilbert or why the great Nation of Prussia had settled for a mid-level officer position. Gilbert liked being in decision-making functions but liked being in close contact with his soldiers more; a major’s position allowed him some modicum of both. What she needed to know, and this was of vital importance, was if this human, this boy, was going to shoot her if he knew the truth.

While the actions and will of their people influenced the predilections of the Nation States, sometimes the opposite ran true. The death of a Nation brought to its people a sense of hopelessness so resounding, a crisis so charged with existential panic, that defeat was often swift and immediate. The Nation state would wake of course—it was incredibly difficult to truly kill a Nation—but upon their waking, an insurmountable amount of damage would have already been done.

Some thirty years ago, dressed as an infantryman, Erzsébet had joined her troops at Lutsk and died there with them, caught on a patch of barbed wire and shot in the shoulder, abdomen, and neck. She lay there in the hot, sweltering sun, with gunshots cracking around her and shells booming above her, twitching and bleeding until she drowned. By the time the sun had set, twenty-six thousand of her soldiers had been captured and three Russian armies had broke through the Austro-Hungarian lines. But what had come first—the Russian commander’s skill or her expiration—no one could say for certain.

A cold feeling slipped into her stomach and her throat tightened. She hated dying. Death is a great big, black pool with no up nor down, no forward or reverse. Neither angels called her home nor Devil dragged her beneath the depths. It was. Just. Nothing. And it seemed as though that nothing would stretch on for all eternity—

—until something would grab her, like a fish hook behind her navel, and pull her back into life. The first surge of oxygen to her deflated lungs, the first gasp from blue lips, always hurt the most.

The turn of this siege, perhaps even the war, now rested in the hands of a shaking, scared, nineteen year old boy.

A bead of sweat rolled down the small of her back and she trembled.

Slowly, Erzsébet made herself nod. Yes, she was like Major Gilbert Beilschmidt, the Nation State of Prussia.

Metzger’s eyes went wide. He discharged the bullet from its chamber. The cold shell flew from the barrel and hit the snow with a heavy but muted plink. The relief that washed over Erzsébet was so great she almost fell to her knees. Instead, a small sound came from her, as though she had been stung, and she covered her mouth to muffle it.

The boy slung his rifle over his shoulder. He removed his helmet and held it in both hands like a shield. The wind ruffled through his wavy, straw-colored hair. He drummed the helmet’s rim. The expression on his face reminded Erzsébet of ancient paintings of Roman soldiers at the foot of the Christ upon the cross.

After some time, he spoke, quietly. “What nation do you represent?” he breathed.

Erzsébet combed her shaking hands through her hair and then crossed her arms. She toed the ground. “This one.”

“ _Ungarn_?”

She nodded and hummed in the affirmative.

“Your…your German is flawless.”

“ _Danke sehr_.”

“I’m sorry,” Metzger sputtered. The red in his cheeks deepened. “I’m sorry. I’m just…It’s my first post and—”

“Put your helmet back on,” she said. “Or at least put on your toque. It’s freezing.”

She understood why he had done it; she didn’t need his explanations.

He did so and snapped the straps in place.

“Where’s your cap then, _Fräuline_ …um… _Ungarn_?”

As if on cue, another breeze whipped down the street, and Erzsébet held her hair down.

“Lost it,” she admitted.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“I’m much more hungry than anything else at the moment. I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”

“Do…do Nations need to eat often?”

“Of course. Have you never seen Major Beilschmidt eat?”

“Only rarely, _Fräuline Ungarn_.”

That raised another series of questions inside her, but Erzsébet did not voice them. “I’m not just here for myself, I’m afraid. Back there—” she gestured to the approximate area where the cellar stood “—there’s a whole host of families. Children. They haven’t had anything more than scraps for days.”

The corners of Metzger’s eyes twitched. He swallowed. “Neither have we,” he murmured.

The earth shifted under her feet, and she felt her empty stomach plummet towards her ankles. It wasn’t so much disappointment that wedged itself in between her ribs, sharp and cold as an icepick. It was despair—complete and undulated despair.

Like ripples on a still lake, that anguish was felt across her people. She could feel it tickling at the back of her mind.

Metzger froze, as if he could feel this wave too. “There’s only a few cans of beans and cabbage,” he said finally. “Five, maybe, for the thirty of us, but that’s only if we’re lucky.”

“Are your commanders not sending you food?” The question was asked less for his well being and more for the procurement of a bargaining chip.

“Our radios have been out for a while,” Metzger replied.

Erzsébet’s blood went as cold as the frozen Danube.

Metzger crossed his arms. He sniffed, running his wrist under his bright red nose. “Besides,” he continued, “even if they were working, we’re just fighting for a few blocks. There are oil field to protect.”

“We have a sick child,” Erzsébet tried. She was far too despondent to worry much about the tremor in her voice.

He licked his lips. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I would if I was able. But, _Fräuline Ungarn_ , we have our own sick.”

Her fingers twitched, and her nostrils flared as her mind jumped from the boy to the Nation whose face he shared. Indignation, fueled by helplessness, charged across her nerves. Erzsébet stopped herself from grabbing him by his lapels, slamming him into the side of the hostel, and screaming at him all the things she wanted to scream at Ludwig. A confederated Germany was supposed to bring many things, but not this (he was supposed to be better). Her throat tightened. She forced herself to look down the street to break her thoughts.

“How old is she?” Metzger asked.

“Who?”

“The girl. The one that’s sick.”

“Seven. She’ll um…she’ll be seven in April.” Erzsébet answered, rubbing the edge of her forehead circles.

Metzger’s shoulder sank and he curled into himself; he was still a bear of a man, though. “My niece is seven,” he replied, his tone hushed and somber.

“Then you know how incredibly small they are.”

He glanced at her with a haunted expression, and quickly, he looked back at his black leather boots. With a nod, he said hesitantly, “I’ll…I’ll see what we can do.”

“Thank you,” Erzsébet murmured, a hint of hope and relief in her voice.

After a moment of pondering, Metzger pulled off his glove, whistled, and waved for his squadmates.

“Hey, Metzger!” one of the NCOs huddled around the vehicles in the hostel’s front yelled. “Keep the fucking noise down, wontcha? Unless you wanna bring the whole fucking Red Army on us.”

The boy winced. “Sorry!” he called back.

“Shut the fuck up!”

The squad of three approached them. Metzger quickly introduced her and informed them that they were going to be getting some food for her.

“No we are fucking _not_ ,” Gehrhardt snapped. “ _I_ just got here. I’m not getting shipped back home because of _her_ piss poor luck.” Metzger tried to protest, but Gehrhardt only raised more complaints and his intonation.

They kept glancing over their shoulders at the group of NCOs and kept their growing shouts as hushed as they could.

Brinkerhoff didn’t say anything but made passing glances at Erzsébet as if he were trying to place her face in his bank of memories. Frankfurt, whose name she had learned was Hertz, simply smiled at her reassuringly. Hertz wore large, thick army-issued glasses and a splatter of moles and birthmarks across his face. He seemed the youngest of them; Erzsébet was sure he had lied on his enlistment card.

Gehrhardt puffed his chest so far that he almost touched Metzger’s, but the blond still dwarfed him. “We’re going to do this, and that’s fucking final,” Metzger growled, baring his teeth. “Do you understand, _Soldat_?”

Gehrhardt glared at him. After a moment, he took a quick step away, dropping his pretensions, and tugged at his own lapels. “Whatever you fucking say, _Obersoldat_.”

Metzger broke them into three teams: he and Brinkerhoff would go into the kitchen on the ground floor, Gehrhardt would watch the door outside the kitchen and Hertz would stay out with Erzsébet.

There were a small set of cement stairs leading to the back entrance of the hostel. The door squeaked as Metzger opened it. He cringed.

Hertz and Erzsébet stood a few steps up, just above the foyer. “If you see someone coming around, give the door a tap,” Brinkerhoff told Hertz.

Hertz nodded.

Metzger told Erzsébet that they would be back soon and that he’d bring back the absolute most of what they could. Erzsébet felt as though she should give him something as thanks but had nothing to offer but her gratitude. To say thank you for such a kind and brave gesture felt so impotent that it bordered on obscene.

Standing on this step, she was just high enough to lean down and kiss Metzger’s cheek. From his hairline to the edge of his toque, the boy turned a ferocious shade of red. It made Erzsébet wonder, just for a moment, if he had ever been kissed before. Had the situation been any shade different, this would have been endearing, charming even.

He, Brinkerhoff and Gehrhardt disappeared into the hostel with a click of the door sliding back into place.

The wind ruffled Erzsébet and Hertz’s clothes and pushed the snow on the ledge down the stairs.

Hertz adjusted his rifle, leaned on the ledge, and crossed his arms. He looked at her with curiosity.

After another stretch of uncomfortable silence, he asked, “What’s it like being a Nation?”

Erzsébet creased her brow and pursed her lips slightly. “That’s an odd question to ask someone.”

“I got to sit next to Major Beilschmidt during mess a few times. Got to talk to him for a bit,” Hertz recalled. “It feels a little different standing next to you because you’re not a German state, but I know what it feels like to be around a Nation.”

Erzsébet scoffed and dug her hands into her pockets. Typical, she thought, that the one who knew what she was would not be the one to interrogate her.

“So…” Hertz dragged out the sound. “What’s it like?”

Erzsébet shrugged with great exaggeration. “I don’t know, Hertz.”

“Call me Sepp.” His smile was young, cocky, and just this side of familiar.

Erzsébet smirked back. “Fine. Sepp. I don’t know what it’s like being a Nation. What’s it like to be human?”

He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he opened his jacket and pulled out a tin case; flipped it open to reveal a small heap of tobacco leaves. From his breast pocket, he pulled out a thin strip of newsprint. He crushed the leaves and sprinkled them into a line. "I'm almost out, and this is shit paper, but um…do you want one?"

He held out his rolled cigarette, which she greedily accepted. As he put together his own, he continued. "Major  Beilschmidt goes through a solid tin of these every day, I swear."

“There’s a war on,” she replied blandly.

“That there is,” Sepp agreed. He took another drag and exhaled through his nose before speaking again.

“Being a human…it’s kinda like this.” He gestured with his cigarette. “It hurts you real bad—I don’t care what any fucking doctor says—but it feels good. It’s warm.”

Erzsébet hummed in agreement.

“But…” There was a strain in the corner of his eyes and a tightness around his mouth that didn’t suit him. He held the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and brought it to the ledge. He rolled it side to side: not hard enough to smother the light, just to make some of the ash fall. “But it doesn’t take much,” he muttered.

If war was nothing but moonshine, Erzsébet wondered what the boy had distilled.

“There must be some good things about it,” she mused, in a meager attempt to lighten the mood and divert his attention.

He took a deep drag, making the end of his cigarette brighten. He exhaled from the corner of his mouth and grinned. “My mom has this schnitzel recipe she only brings out for Christmas. Old family secret. It’s so good, it’ll knock you on your ass, swear to fucking God.”

His expression faded, and he looked beyond her, as if his own mother stood somewhere within the wreckage. He dropped his gaze and kicked the heel of his boot against the wall.

“Do you have a mother, _Fräuline Ungarn_?” he asked.

The image of the woman cooking meats in the _bogrács_ in the small village along the river crossed her mind. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, where the white five-petaled flower had perched many, many years ago. With a hissing drag, the memory burned away. She shrugged.

“Who can say?” she sighed. “But even the Christ had Mary.” A cold, deeper than the winter’s air, seemed to fill a hollow space slowly growing where Erzsébet’s heart ought to be. She tapped the ash and cleared her throat.

“Are you close with them?” Erzsébet asked. She gestured towards the door with her cigarette.

Sepp nodded. “They’re closer than friends,” he smiled. “They’re my brothers.”

It was a refrain she had heard time and again among her soldiers. She nodded, understanding.

“Metzger and Gehrhardt get into it all the time, but…I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I think that’s just how they show they care. They’re both stubborn jackasses, and Gehrhardt’s pissy because Metzger got promoted before he did.” He took another drag.

"You know what else is pretty great about being human?"

"What?"

"Sex."

Erzsébet snorted.

“What?” he whined.

“You’re just a child!”

“Am not.” He pounded his narrow chest with his fist, the sound lost among the folds of his fatigues. “I’m seventeen years old.”

“A _child_.”

“Maybe to you, a Nation, that’s tens of thousands of years old.”

“Only one thousand, thank you!” Give or take a few centuries. “And quite the contrary—seventeen is young for anyone.”

Sepp laughed. “You talk way too fancy. It’s war, _Fräuline Ungarn_. Lighten up.”

Erzsébet rolled her eyes. “Sepp, you aren’t old enough to have ever been in love.”

“Tell that to Senta.”

“So, did you take up arms to run from your broken heart or to prove to her that you were a man?”

Sepp’s grin fell and he blushed. “No. I-I did that for my country.”

The drag Erzsébet took in was not nearly as sweet as those before had been. “I see,” she breathed. She wondered if Sepp had ever met Ludwig. The Nation left much to be desired by way of charisma. Unless something incredible had happened since the last she saw him (quietly Erzsébet admitted that something incredible _had_ happened), Ludwig was more likely to push people away than compel them to take up arms for and with him.

Sepp shifted on the ledge. “Have you, _Fräuline Ungarn_?”

“Have I what?”

“Ever been in love?”

Erzsébet blanched, but hoped it was subtle enough of a move and dark enough of a night that Sepp couldn’t see her. She swallowed as she tapped the ash from her cigarette.

“It’s _different_ for Nations,” she asserted.

Sepp scoffed. “That’s a coward’s bullshit answer if I ever heard one.”

“It’s the truth!” she exclaimed through the kind of nervous chuckle one makes when they’ve been accused of something unjustly. Erzsébet, after all, was not in the business of lying to herself. She was honest and forthright with her feelings, observations, and opinions. She might not always express them aloud for others’ judgment, but she always had them and always knew what they were.

“Did you love your husband?”

“What?”

“The _Austro-Hungarian_ Empire,” Sepp clarified. “I’m assuming that was a union of some sort.”

“It was.”

“Well. Did you love him?”

“Of…” the words died on Erzsébet’s lips, as if smited from existence by the Lord Himself. She pressed her lips together and felt the back of her neck prickle. She countered with a simple, “It was complicated,” and left it at that.

Sepp’s grin was wicked. “Alright, _Fräuline Ungarn_. You keep lying to yourself.”

Erzsébet did not lie to herself. She finished her cigarette and tossed the butt to the side as well. She was nearly about to scold him for his incredibly invasive questions and his impertinent curiosity. The urgent, rapid tapping of rubber boots on linoleum floor stopped her though.

The door swung open.

Metzger, Brinkenhoff, and Gehrhardt piled out. They were pale, despite the red in their cheeks and ears. They were breathing hard, and sweat glistened on their foreheads. Metzger pushed a tin can in her arms, marked Chicken Soup in blue ink.

Gehrhardt leaned on his knees. His words came out in spurts. “That’s been here since before we got here.” He panted. “Be careful.”

“You’ve got to get out of here,” Brinkenhoff panted. “They’re…They’re looking for us.”

As if on cue, a booming voice echoed from inside. It sounded far, but not far enough for Erzsébet to protest. With her heart in her throat, she jammed the can in her coat pocket, turned on her heel and dashed up the stairs, down the alley.

She kept to the shadows and kept her quiet, regardless of how much she wanted to holler her gratitude at them. She looked back once, over her shoulder. The three were situating themselves to appear as natural and to breathe as normally as they could. The door slammed open and a small and portly fellow emerged.

Sepp caught her eye and nodded just before jumping into a long-winded tirade towards the officer. It was a small gesture of consolation; if anyone could talk their way out of discipline, a demotion, or a complete discharge, it was Sepp Hertz.

By the time she had made it back to the cellar, her watch read _8:43_.

And the following evening, after a brusque knocking on the door to the cellar, Erzsébet opened it, revealing the four German soldiers, arms full of cans and canteens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone for coming back around for chapter 2! Sorry it took so long to get up, but these last few months have been _insane_.
> 
> Once again, can we get a magnificent round of applause for [Miss Miranda](http://221bdisneystreet.tumblr.com/), who continues to knock the beta ball out of the park? :D
> 
> Also, a big thanks to my friend [Mayya](http://orangeplaneta.tumblr.com/) for her continued wonderful art. Go give her a follow if you like her stuff! :)
> 
> I'm not gonna lie folks. This was a hard one to write.
> 
> The direction of this chapter was entirely based off of real memories of the siege. While doing research for this chapter, I found this short memoir of events leading up to, that happened during and after the siege of Budapest. Magda Németh, who was thirteen at the time, as far as I can tell from her bio, isn't a politician nor is she an academic. She is just an ordinary person who lived through a very extraordinary time. And I was compelled to write the this story because of that. [I encourage you all to check out her story.](http://hungarianreview.com/article/20150114_during_and_after_the_siege_of_budapest_1944_1945_)
> 
> I also decided to make Hungary a civilian in this chapter for this story because one of the articles I was reading said that Hungary was not ready for the war in general, or the Soviets in particular. They hardly had an army, but only in the most technical terms of it. I remember reading something about their army being most made up of bureaucrat non-commissioned officers, and when I find that article, I will throw the link in the shownotes here. It was the from the same article that mentioned how the Arrow Cross were basically plucking kids from the streets to fight. When I find the link to that article, I will put it here in the shownotes. I'm fairly certain I grabbed that from Tony Judt's book.
> 
> [Check out this link for pics from the siege, if you're like me and this chapter was your first introduction to the city's siege.](http://welovebudapest.com/budapest.and.hungary/eve.of.destruction.the.siege.of.budapest.began.70.years.ago) There are no dead bodies or anything. Just the carnage of urban warfare.
> 
> Again, I'm just a simple American. If there's anything factually wrong or misrepresented, please let me know and I'll do my best to fix it up.
> 
>  ~~don't forget to like, comment, subscribe~~ [Follow me on the tumbls for updates regarding this fic and my slow descent into grad-school fueled alcoholism.](https://america-oreosandkitkats.tumblr.com/)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Have I ever told you that I genuinely like you, Zsóka?” Gilbert asked._
> 
> _She hummed. “Been a while, I think.”_
> 
> _“Well, I do. You’re spitfire and daring, and I’ll walk into Hell on my own, swear to fucking God, if I see you as anything else in our miserable little lives.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for some pretty rough exchanges between Russia and Hungary at the end of this chapter. Let me know if there's anything else that should be flagged.

Erzsébet woke to the scent of heavy smoke and the taste of tobacco on her tongue.

Snowflakes swirled outside her window, the wind just strong enough to ruffle the cream-colored curtains. The amber street lights threw deep and sharp shadows across her room. She blinked, and where there had been the facade of a crumbling building now stood her bookshelf; the shadow of a tank became the shadow of an upholstered chair propped next to her back window; the sounds of a payload careening toward her city faded into the whistling draft caught in the open space between her window frame and the wall.

The war, she reminded herself, had been over for some time now—her bed was warm and soft and dry. Erzsébet bundled her blankets close and shut her eyes again. Her empty stomach pinched.

The sun had many hours until it stepped up from the horizon, but a drop of indigo bled through the soot-colored sky. Sunrise, morning, would come soon.

Outside, busses rumbled along salted roads. In their hulls sat a smattering of people, curled up in coats and scarves, on their early way to work or coming home late. Some read the paper, folded up into quarters, gleaning as much as they could through Soviet filtered inkwells. Others kept their noses buried in battered paperbacks. They didn’t speak to each other, for it was far too early to engage in even the most polite of exchanges. The trams clattered on their steel tracks and slid on their wires, warm light brightening the snowy streets. A few cars rolled along, with Serbian drivers and men with wool suits in the back.

The infant in the apartment next to hers wailed, cutting the silence into nothing. It was soon followed by the father’s groan and shouts from the mother. Soon, _her_ mother joined the fray with her shrill voice. What they were arguing about so early Erzsébet couldn’t figure out. They were always arguing though.

Across the hallway, the painter clicked on his radio and turned up the dial. Today, it was Rimsky-Korsakov and his bumblebee.

The professor and his wife, residents of the apartment next to hers, turned off their alarm, which shrieked through the other wall.

Hers went off not a moment later.

Erzsébet groped for her lamp’s pullstring and clicked it on, squinting against its brightness. She silenced her alarm and swung her legs over the side of the bed. The ground was cold under her toes. The joints in her fingers were stiff and ached. She looked down at her hands, resting in her lap, as if staring at them might dampen the pain and make them move. Erzsébet had never been accused of having masculine hands, but she could remember a time when her nails weren’t so well-kept.

Slowly, she curled her fingers in. It was as though she were pulling them in against stone or against marble. When her shaped and trimmed nails reached her palms, Erzsébet pressed them into the surface of her skin, though the sensation she felt was slight and distant. She did this until the feeling became more pronounced, until the movement itself became easier. When the crescent moons in her palm were dark and deep, she stopped—and sighed. This was the pain of an older person, an ancient country. Her hands were arthritic with economic troubles and political strife. It was all a bit rather…

 _Pathetic_.

She gripped the edge of her mattress. It was not her own voice that chastised her, but Gilbert’s raucous tenor. From the time they were children until the very moments before the Great War, he had always had a quick jab or a cutting smirk for her troubles, sharp enough to bristle her nerves and make her howl in defiance like a cat. He seemed, in those days, less amused by his jokes, but by her reaction. His whole face would light up and he would tell her to calm down, calling her by a petname not even her husband dared address her as. Zsóka.

But it was a mutual needling. She smiled softly to herself here, captured for a moment by an ancient memory. Once, she had teased him about his still-cracking voice and his short stature until he had turned red as a pepper and had run from her, only to trip, fall, split his breeches and skin his knees. She appeared in those days no older than sixteen (as the Ottoman Wars had yet to ignite), and he, soft-cheeked, impertinent and with lands recently united with Brandenburg, appearing just on the cusp of thirteen—a boy.

Adolescent cruelty and adult teasing aside, there were few things in this life she found more endearing than Gilbert when he was agitated. As an adult, he had become incredibly skilled at concealing his concerns with either sarcasm or stone cold stoicism. By the turn of the century, not even Roderich could rouse the Nation State. But she could. She could always make the tips of his pale ears turn bright red.

 _Could_ , she mused, and her smile faded. The ache in her hands had crawled into the hollow of her chest.

It was difficult to kill a Nation—it was perhaps the most difficult thing one could attempt to do in this world—but it wasn’t impossible. It rarely came through violent means. The death of a Nation was always marked by the cut of signatures against thick notarized sheets blazoned with the seals of Great Powers (and when it was invented, the blinding white light of camera flashes capturing suffocating handshakes and teeth-baring smiles).

Many had died in the war, and Gilbert had been one of them.

Erzsébet pushed herself off the bed. If she didn’t start her day soon, one of the two secret police agents, whom she was sure were watching her apartment, would begin to wonder what was keeping her.

She dressed in a pair of wool pants, loose in the legs, but fitted at the high waist, colored brown; a cotton blouse, white, which she tucked. She tossed a forest green blazer over the back of her sofa and pushed the bed back into its frame. Her hair, she twisted into a low-lying chingon and tucked her bangs back with a floral pin.

The tea she drank was black, lukewarm, and sweetened with a teaspoon edge’s worth of honey. As she waited for her bread to toast on the stove, Erzsébet watched the snow fall from her window and paid the radio the absolute least amount of her attention. It was mostly noise to drown out the crying infant and her neighbor, the painter. She didn’t have a record player, hadn’t had one for a few years now, so this would have to do.

After the news report—more pronouncements regarding the prosperous Soviet Hungarian-Russian partnership and a call to be vigilant against the omnipresent, imperialist West—the station crackled out a pretty clarinet melody. Prokofiev, a part in the back of her mind provided. She couldn’t remember the last time she had heard Bartók or Liszt.

The coolness that flooded her hands had nothing to do with her now cold tea and everything instead with the crawling sensation in the pit of her stomach.

 

* * *

 

 If there was anything Erzsébet wished she could do in her long life, it would be to visit every university across her land and meet with every student in the departments of international relations and political science. She wanted to take their young and impressionable hands, look them in their young and impressionable eyes and tell them, with the utmost seriousness, that while she personally appreciated their endeavors, they were, quite frankly, wasting their time.

Young people approached politics the way she used to approach wild horses, with the wide-eyed ambition of taming the untamable. She wanted to redirect their optimism and energy elsewhere, to more productive sectors like agriculture or industry. Politics, contrary to popular belief, was not a horse to break. In fact, Erzsébet likened it more to a slug: ugly and slow-moving, leaving a trail of sticky unmentionables in its wake; a crawl of inane minutiae that must be inspected and argued and deconstructed to its most subatomic level. Every. Single. Day. The installation of a single Party headed by a single individual only seemed to compound the work and the monotony. She certainly couldn’t remember the tedium being so extreme under an absolute monarchy.

Diplomacy and foreign policy were horses of a completely different breed altogether.

The absurdity of daily politics was such that Erzsébet had genuinely considered, on more than one occasion, slipping vodka into either her coffee or the coffees of her ministers, their staffers, and the whole damn Politburo. It wouldn’t be so difficult to do.

For all of its intense focus on banal details though, the grind of government had a tendency to fall off its schedule. Their 8:00 in the morning meeting turned into an 8:30 meeting, which then turned later into 9:15.

Part of that delay had been because the man in charge of delegating conference space denied their last minute request to switch rooms. The heat had gone out in their particular corner of the Parliament building last night, but the gatekeeper had no sympathy. “Move one conference and the balance is all thrown off,” he had said. They would only have to be inconvenienced for the time of their meeting; he would be hounded for the rest of the day.

People were still filing in through the conference room’s narrow oak doors at 9:20 as Gereben Anastas began his presentation.

Mid-level representatives of various ministries—namely agriculture, internal affairs, trade and the national planning board of course—sat around nine wooden tables, situated in a horseshoe shape, in chairs fitted with faded red linen backs and seats. Lower officers sat around the room in blue chairs, faces down and pens up, scratching notes along their small pads. It was less to record what Gereben was saying and more to keep the blood flowing to their fingers.

The man speaking was probably as old as she was, but while Erzsébet had the vitality of Nationhood keeping her appearing and functioning as a well-reasoned thirty year old, he was only human. Gereben read flatly from his notes, looking up over his round, wireframe glasses on the rarest of occasions. Sometimes, he would stop, turn to the stand next to him, and turn the page to another graph or chart with a palsy hand.

Someone would cough, someone would sniff, and sometimes the wind would rattle the glass in the tall windows—though never loud enough that Gereben had to repeat himself, to everyone’s relief.

Erzsébet sat at the horseshoe in the furthest corner. She had taken off her pumps and dug her toes into the rug. She jotted something of interest down, circled it.

She had no power of her own, not really; her title, First Consultant to the Heads of State, was as empty as the bowls in her kitchen. She reported directly to General Secretary Nagy Imre and, like today, floated between ministerial meetings, but her influence was more like a gentle breeze on a spring day than the pull of a planet. It was impossible to determine which way the waves of influence flowed, the Nation or their people; their desires became her compulsions, and her considerations became their uprisings. But sometimes, Erzsébet found the answer quite resoundfully in the halls of her own government.

Iszák sat behind her, snores melding into Gereben’s tedious drawl.

She did have her own office though, that was nice—a small corner at the end of a lonely hallway on the sixth floor.

Erzsébet glanced across the table at the black haired man with piercing blue eyes—Procházka was his family name. She couldn’t think of his given one. He was a liaison for the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He knew what she was (knew what she thought of the press and of the disappearances), and made sure she couldn’t even speak with the Minister’s secretary, let alone the man himself. Despite this, however, Erzsébet had found something of a kinship with the secretary, Daria. The sprightly young woman occasionally had butterscotch drops her husband had snatched from the Embassy and always gave her two. Daria also made sure to make it seem as though Erzsébet’s reports had come from the Ministry of Energy, or someplace equally innocuous.

By the grace of God alone, Gereben was still talking. Erzsébet tapped the side of her nose to the beat of some song she had heard on the radio, in part to distract herself, in part to keep herself awake.

The man paused slightly in his speech as he turned the page of his notes. Nyilas Stefan stood and declared to the room that he would like to make a proposal.

A chorus of voices crying _seconded_ echoed against the high ceilings.

Stefan pulled back his coat sleeve to look at his watch. “It is just after 11:00,” he announced. Someone across from Erzsébet muttered _fucking hell_ under their breath and she stifled a snicker. “While I thank Mr. Gereben for delivering this important analysis,” Stefan continued, “I must ask the room if we are not all ready for a quick recess.”

“ _Aye!_ ” Erzsébet called, raising her hand high and stiff as a pole. She said it so loud that all eyes turned to her and Iszák stirred.

“All those in favor, say _aye_ ,” Stefan said without so much a nod in her direction.

The room responded with twenty-nine of thirty votes. When someone woke Iszák with a soft kick to his extended foot, the vote went up to unanimity.

As they shuffled their things into creaking leather briefcases, Stefan instructed them to reconvene at 12:15, but Erzsébet wondered just how many of them would be pulled away by sudden, urgent developments in their ministries. She slid her pumps back on her feet.

Behind her, Iszák stretched and groaned. She turned and watched him rub the back of his neck with a tight-browed expression, trying to piece the world back together. She snorted. He asked what was so funny.

“You,” Erzsébet answered. “Your eyes are as red as tomatoes. Why are you so tired?”

“My f-f-family,” Iszák yawned. He dragged his hand down his face. “Remember my cousin, Kolos? The one I was talking to you about yesterday?”

Erzsébet hummed in the affirmative. “The one who works on the council up north?” She opened her satchel, pulled out her wallet and counted her meal vouchers.

“Well, his wife is pregnant and due any day now.”

Erzsébet dropped her hands into her lap and beamed. “That’s wonderful news, Iszák!” He offered his thanks and a grin. “Do they think it’s a boy or girl?”

“He says she’s carrying high, so they think it’s a boy.”

“Oh, they must be so excited. Is it their first child?”

“Yeah, and that’s half the problem,” he chuckled. He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palms and grumbled as he shook his head. “Kolos called last night _completely_ beside himself, and Dad tried to calm him down.”

Erzsébet didn’t even know what Kolos looked like, but over the years, she had seen many men across many stations near the birth of their first child. She could see clearly the panicked sweat upon Kolos’ brow and hear the terror in the tremor of his voice. She could also see how hard he would be trying to keep all of that behind a cool demeanor of competence and confidence.

“Poor guy,” Erzsébet cooed.

“Then my fiancé started asking questions about marriage and kids,” Iszák continued, “and Mom was _more_ than happy to indulge in all sorts of stories. Then, Dad broke out the pálinka, and the next thing _I_ knew, it was two in the morning and we were still going strong.”

A brunette from the Ministry of Agriculture, whom Iszák recognized and waved to, stepped over his outstretched legs and trotted out the door, leaving him and Erzsébet the last ones in the frigid conference room.

Iszák stood, then stretched once more. Erzsébet rose to her feet and brushed her pants of nonexistent lint. He offered her the right of way through the door.

The hallways were not still, as there were small herds of staffers, running from room to room with arms full of folders and papers, but they were certainly far quieter than they had been this morning. The business of government was in session and bustling behind closed doors.

“Do they have a name picked out?” she asked. They walked down the hall towards the eastern corridors.

“Józsi, if it’s a boy,” Iszák said.

“And if it’s a girl?”

Iszák chuckled. “You’ll get a kick out of this. If it’s a girl, Terezía is _insistent_ they name her Erzsi.”

Erzsébet laughed. She placed her hand over her heart and said, “Well then, I must insist as well. It is a _fabulous_ name.”

“Two votes for Erzsi then.”

They came to a stop where the hallway split into left and right. The stairs leading to the cafeteria were to the right. Erzsébet toyed with the ends of her sleeve.

“Let me buy you lunch,” she offered. “To celebrate my namesake.”

Iszák rubbed the back of his neck. “Thanks, but I’ll have to pass this time, Miss Héderváry—”

“Erzsébet,” she corrected.

A faint blush dusted his cheeks. She nodded and hummed encouragingly. “Erzsébet. If I don’t get any sleep, I’m not going to make it through the rest of the day. I’m going back to the office to close my eyes for a bit.”

The way his shoulders hunched over, the heavy gait in his step certainly suggested that nothing more than a gentle push would send him to the carpeted floor. That did not stop Erzsébet from gripping the strap of her satchel and sinking a bit into herself.

“Oh.”

She had intended that with more nonchalance than apparently she’d given it, as a twinge of guilt pinched Iszák’s exhausted expression. She could have kicked herself.

“B-but I’ll see you tonight though. Right?”

Erzsébet creased her brow. “For what?”

“Some of us are going to the bar tonight? Red Door. I mentioned it yesterday.”

“Oh! Right, right.”

“We’re planning on being there around eight and we’ll probably be there until eleven or so.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said. “But you go. Go, please. Get some rest.”

“Eight o’clock?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll be _incredibly_ disappointed if you don’t.”

“We’ll see.”

“Alright, alright.” Iszák shrugged. He backpedaled a few steps and waved. “I’ll see you ’round, Erzsébet.”

“See you, kid.”

He turned away and trotted down the hallway, leaving her to herself.

Erzsébet crossed her arms as she made her way down the stairs and towards the basement cafeteria.

An evening of drinks with coworkers? She could laugh at such a statement.

There was something so incredibly quaint about the invitation—something so _normal_. She almost wanted to confess, to end her charade that there was nothing extraordinary about her with Iszák. He didn’t understand that there were certain things that she simply couldn’t do because of her nature as a Nation State. Between the Paradox and the fact that their lives were so short compared to hers, why, the notion of such relations. Absurd.

Though, to be fair, it wasn’t as though she had _never_ commiserated with her constituents, be it over drinks or food or otherwise, though rarely had she done it under the pretenses of humanity. It had been…a long time since she’d done it.

Such a simple act, but, did she even remember how to?

What she needed more than anything right now was food from the cafeteria by herself.

A voice stirred her from her thoughts, and she looked up from her shoes down the hallway. Gereben quickly approached her, his black cane striking the red carpet with muffled clicks. “Miss Héderváry!” he called. “Miss Héderváry, may I join you?”

With a short huff, she nodded. She had no ill will for the man; he had been a public servant for decades and possessed a level of patience reserved for saints when deliberating with the more vehement Party members. It was just that food, as always, would have to wait.

Erzsébet was not a very tall woman. Even standing in pumps and he crouched over his cane, the aging bureaucrat still had a few centimeters on her. He extended his hand to her, but when she took it, he brought her knuckles to his lips.

“ _Magyar Népköztársaság_ ,” he addressed her as he covered her hand with his. It was her name as she knew herself, the Hungarian People’s Republic. He gestured before them, and they began their stroll toward the grand central hall.

“I wanted to thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule by coming to this morning’s engagement,” Gereben said. “I’m sure our Nation has far more important issues to mind.”

Erzsébet shrugged and shook her head, dismissing his comment. “Secretary Nagy said it would be informative.”

“And was it?”

“It was fine, sir.”

He hummed. “I am not the orator I was in my youth, I must admit. I forget things much easier now.”

Erzsébet had heard that once, the man at her side was an engaging and lively speaker, but age had dampened his energy and the disappearance of his granddaughter two years ago stifled his spirit. Knowing this, she tried to smile at him with sympathy. “It was fine, sir.”

“You don’t need to lie to an old man,” he assured.

“How about to an old colleague?”

“Then you _really_ ought to know better.” He grinned.

They were quiet for a few steps before Gereben asked, “Who was that you were talking to just now? The one who fell asleep during my _very_ important talk.”

“Oh, his name is Iszák. He’s new. Very sweet.” She told him that his family was expecting a child very soon, and a wistful glint caught in Gereben’s eye.

“The first ones are easy!” he declared with a chuckle. “ _That’s_ when you get help. It’s the ones after that that are a problem. How old is this soon-to-be father?”

Erzsébet shrugged. “I don’t know. But Iszák isn’t even twenty-five yet. They seem very close though, so I’d say they’re similar in age.”

“He _is_ new,” Gereben muttered.

Their conversation lulled as they passed by a group of staffers, who seemed about in the same age range as Iszák. A girl, blonde with a round face, greeted Erzsébet and since she did not know Gereben, addressed him as _sir_.

“It’s been quite some time since you were that young, hasn’t it, Miss Hungary?”

Erzsébet feigned offense with an exaggerated gasp and a hand upon her heart. “Didn’t your mother teach you not to ask a lady things regarding her age?”

Gereben held his free hand up in concession. “Fair point, Miss Hungary. Fair point.”

After a moment, she answered sincerely. “It’s hard, you know, to gauge a Nation’s age like a human’s, but I think it was…yes. I think the Napoleonic wars. Or maybe right after.” Her shoulders rose with her sigh. “It was a long time ago.”

 

* * *

 

_Her freckles were far more prominent then, standing out like a splatter of ink across the bridge of her nose. She was reckless and guileless too, which drew the ire of her leaders as there was decorum to be mindful of and potential alliances to consider._

_It was a strange time: Hungary, Austria and Prussia, and several other Nations, united in a clear sense of solidarity against the Parisian fires of revolution. She had never seen, nor would she see again, Roderich laugh at one of Gilbert’s lewd and demonstrably inappropriate jokes._

_That evening at the palace in Vienna, diplomacy and wargaming had given way to drinking and merriment, which soon gave way to slumber and quiet. It was late: servants had drawn the heavy curtains, extinguished the glittering chandeliers and cleared away the food, plates and wine glasses. A lone servant tried his best to wake Roderich, sprawled on one of the sofas and snoring, but to no avail._

_An orchestra of crickets serenaded the full moon and stars._

_The peace was not to last, however. Once the crickets played a verse of their twilight lullaby, the distinct sound of boots striking and bare feet pattering on the polished wood floors echoed down one of the halls, followed thereafter by many pairs of boots and voices demanding the Nations to stop running from them._

_Erzsébet told Gilbert to run ahead, that she’d find him eventually. Nodding, he dashed to the right and she ran to the left. Her hand was still warm where he had held it._

_As she turned the corner down an empty hallway, Erzsébet hiked up her skirts and picked up her pace. When she found a flight of servants’ stairs, she dashed up them, the sound of her feet striking each steps loud and sharp as gunfire. She raced down this empty hall, feeling his Nationality like the hum of impending lightning on the back of her neck. She pulled out the pale pink ribbon tying her hair up with a cackle. She shook her head, freeing her curled tresses, which fluttered behind her like a wrinkled flag._

_Her thighs ached and the bare floors were hard against her bare feet. The back of her throat burned with each breath and the skin under her stay had started to itch from sweat. Her mind was as clear as paprikash. But to run—to feel her muscles stretch and pull, to fly—sent a wild thrill through her. She was alive and she was powerful, young and a central player on the European stage._

_When she was sure she had lost the detail of Austrian security, Erzsébet leaned against a wall. She gathered the front of her rose-colored skirts and pressed them against her forehead and the back of her neck, which raged with the nearness of another powerful Nation. The air she took in was cold and sweet and soothing to her lungs; her mouth was hot and still tasted of apricot pálinka._

_The door across from her creaked, revealing an equally amused and equally drunk Gilbert, whose face was scarlet and blotchy. His skin seemed to glow in the light of the sconce._

_“Did we lose them?” he asked._

_Erzsébet nodded. “I think so.”_

_They had wanted nothing more than a moment of solitude._

_Gilbert jerked his head to the side—_ come here _. After a quick glance over her shoulder, she crossed the hallway and the threshold. He closed the door behind her._

_He had claimed a small, private study area as their hideaway. Merlot-colored rugs had been rolled across the floors, plush under her toes like sand. Walnut bookcases lined the walls and from the musty old tomes lining their shelves came the subtle scent of vanilla._

_Moonlight filtered into the room from a narrow pane of glass hardly larger than her forearm. There was just enough light for Erzsébet to see a work table and chair. Gilbert, whose poor eyesight had been the bane of his pride, did not. He stumbled into it, swore, but recovered in such a way that he plopped into its seat. It teetered, but did not fall._

_Erzsébet tried to stifle her giggles, but the alcohol had removed all sense of propriety. She nearly doubled over herself and had to use a bookcase to stand upright._

_“Oh, you think this is funny?” Gilbert asked, crossing his arms and grinning slyly._

_Erzsébet leaned her flushed body against the cool bookshelf as she recovered._

_“Watching you—” she snorted “—watching you stumble around and hurt yourself like the_ dummkopf _you are is one of the few joys the Good Mother Mary has given me.”_

_“You must be thinking of another Gilbert Beilschmidt, because I,” he hiccuped before continuing, “I am frightening and awe-inspiring.”_

_“Your idiocy confounds even the most gifted scholar,_ Herr Pruess-ss-en _.” Erzsébet broke out into another fit of intoxicated snickers._

_Gilbert clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth. He rocked the chair forward, letting the momentum bring him to his feet and to her._

_He had lost his cravat somewhere around their third round of drinks, and his high open collar drew her attention to his sharp jaw and Adam’s apple. There was a tremendous space between the crown of her head and his chin; she could hardly reach the line of his broad shoulders. When exactly he had surpassed her in height, Erzsébet could not remember. She only knew that she had to strain her neck to meet his gaze as she did now, but for some reason, she did not mind._

_It wasn’t true what they said about those afflicted with albinism; their eyes weren’t red, not always anyway, only in certain lights and at particular angles. Here in the moonlight, they were blue: as deep and as captivating as the Baltic Sea._

_The racing of her heart and the flutter in her belly were absolutely ridiculous side effects of the nearness of their Nationalities—or perhaps it was only the pálinka. She made note that she would have to talk with the waitstaff in the morning._

_Gilbert wrapped a lazy arm around her waist and dipped to her level. He was warm and smelled like plum schnapps. He grazed his lips against her ear and had the ground not been completely flat and she had not been completely still, Erzsébet would have thought that she had stepped off a ledge. She shivered, slightly, in his grasp._

_“I think the real riddle is,” he murmured, “is who is the bigger_ dummkopf _: the idiot, or the one who, after centuries, still hangs around him?”_

_She pulled away and gasped, feigning offense and slapped his arm. As he shot a mischievous grin, his wild eyes twinkled like fireflies trapped in a jar._

_With a hitch, and a shriek from herself, he picked her up off of her feet and stepped back into the chair._

_But the motion was simply too much, too fast. They missed the chair completely and landed on the rug, hard. The serene atmosphere was punctured by a sharp chorus of Hungarian and German swears._

_Gilbert had taken the brunt of the fall and the brunt of her weight. He groaned next to her. Erzsébet rolled off him and turned to the ceiling, which spun as if it were a top._

_“Are you going to live?” she asked._

_“For the sake of Europe, I fucking hope so.”_

_Erzsébet giggled. “_ Dummkopf _.”_

_She rolled to her side to face him. He did the same. The moonlight traced his outline and she supposed he looked about twenty; she herself must have appeared no older than twenty-three. If she were being completely honest with herself, she might have even considered him handsome. Though his figure had become striking—high cheekbones, a straight and even nose and a hard, sinewy frame as strong as it was fast—there were whispers of adolescent softness in his smooth cheeks._

 

_ _

 

 _“_ You _chose to follow me,” Gilbert muttered._

_“Because you’re always getting into trouble,” Erzsébet cooed playfully. She drew circles on the rug. “It’s my job to keep you in line.”_

_His laugh was sharp. “I’d love to see the Kingdom of_ Ungarn _try to hold back my armies.”_

 _Erzsébet rolled her eyes and gave his shoulder a little shove. “Not_ Pruessen _. You. Gilbert.”_

 _He swatted her arm away, the back of his hand ghosting over her wrist for a moment. “_ You _have to keep_ me _in line?” He chuckled. “You had three more drinks than I did.”_

_Erzsébet dismissed his comment with a wave._

_There was a space between them, but she was close enough that she could feel the warmth coming off his body._

_“Have I ever told you that I genuinely like you, Zsóka?” Gilbert asked._

_She hummed. “Been a while, I think.”_

_“Well, I do. You’re spitfire and daring, and I’ll walk into Hell on my own, swear to fucking God, if I see you as anything else in our miserable little lives.”_

_The window was small and was closed. It was perfectly natural for her cheeks to warm._

_After a pause, Gilbert added, “They’re your elements.”_

_Erzsébet hiccuped. “My what?”_

_“When we die,” Gilbert responded, “we’re resolved to our elements.”_

_A morbid change of subject, to be sure, but children, fools and drunken men speak the truth, and he was rather all three wrapped up in one. She was far too drunk herself to protest._

_“Our bodies break down into ash and dust,” he continued, “but it’s the parts of who we are that’ll be Judged. You, Zsóka? You got good elements.”_

_If she were in any right state of mind, Erzsébet would have said she thought he glanced, just for a moment, at her mouth. She also might have said she was disappointed that he hadn’t reached out and touched her in some way. Gilbert rested his hand between them and adjusted his weight._

_“You really think that you’ll be Judged, Gilbert?” she asked._

_His expression clouded, light hearted inebriation giving way to sincerity, devilish craft to mortal fear. He finally answered her in a whisper, “Of course.”_

 

* * *

 

The ache from this morning crept back into her heart; the pain pulled her back to the present and rooted her there. Erzsébet twisted her mouth into a scowl and set her jaw.

“Perhaps not long enough, Miss Hungary?” Gereben said.

She waved off his comment, and he found humor in that.

Before Erzsébet could say anything else, a set of double doors three rooms up opened with an echoing click. She couldn’t see the group until they all spilled out into the hallway, but she could hear them. Their chatter was not Hungarian, but the rapid, blunt Russian that Muscovites conversed with.

This did not concern her. Soviet troops had not left her borders since the war’s end, and advisors and diplomats from the Kremlin were a common sighting.

Their clothes seemed new, clean lines and rich colors, and well tailored. Their cheeks were full and their laughs bright, and there was a luster in their hair that Erzsébet hadn’t seen in hers for decades.

This also did not concern her.

The last man in the group closed the door behind them, and the little hairs on her arms and the base of her neck prickled, as though she stood next to a generator. Her skin felt raw and exposed. A Nation, and a powerful one at that, stood among them.

When the man looked down the hall and his hyacinth eyes reached hers, Erzsébet’s stomach dropped as if she had stepped off a ledge and into an abyss. He smiled at her, but there was no humor in his bared teeth.

Ivan.

Russia.

Erzsébet swore under her breath. Gereben asked what was the matter, but she paid him no mind.

Ivan dismissed himself from the bureaucrats. He shook hands with the men and kissed the only woman in the group on her cheeks, once, twice, three times. With a rumbling baritone, he proposed meeting later that evening for dinner and drinks at some polite but unspecified date in the future.

The Soviets, for the most part, ignored her as they walked past, far too interested in their blathering about what they might find in the cafeteria. The woman looked at Erzsébet as though she recognized her Nationality, but couldn’t quite reconcile it with her diminutive stature.

Erzsébet cleared her throat, rounded her shoulders and faced him.

She always forgot, until he stood right in front of her, how tall the Nation State of Soviet Russia really was. Taller than even Ludwig, he was almost two hundred centimeters flat and it made her mouth go dry.

His figure reminded her of a rook on a chessboard: a pillar designed to the last stone to stand forthright and unconquerable and only able to move in uncompromising hard lines. The black turtleneck he wore under an almond-colored blazer emphasized the straight lines of his torso. His were the muscles formed from toil and labor. To the casual observer, they were peers, about thirty and only months apart.

She couldn’t fight him. She never could. Ludwig, perhaps, was one who’d come close, but Stalingrad had put Verdun to shame.

As Ivan’s people disappeared down the hall, his light expression coiled into something cross and churlish. In the shadows cast by the warm morning sun filtering in from the broad windows above, his gaze seemed sharper. The color seemed more prominent, unnatural even.

Ivan jerked his head to the side— _come here_. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket and tucked one behind his ear.

Erzsébet exhaled evenly through her nose before turning to Gereben. “Tell the other committee members that something urgent has come up in my department,” she instructed.

Gereben nodded and gave her a soft, concerned smile before bidding his farewell.

Erzsébet set her jaw and tried to match Ivan’s stare.

“Are you going to stand there all day, _Tovarish Vengria_ , or are we going to lunch?” he asked, leaning against a nearby column. His tone held no ridicule, but still she bristled. He had used the informal _you_.

“Can I have five minutes to get my coat?” The subtle touch of bitterness betrayed the overall calm in her voice.

He waved his hand in dismissal and added, “ _Bystro_.” Be quick.

She trotted to the main hallway and gathered her coat from the coat room. And after what felt like an eternity, pulled it on as she made her way back. When she finally returned to Ivan, the Nation of the Russian Soviet State pushed himself off the pillar.

“I said quickly,” he snapped.

Erzsébet stuffed her fists into her pockets. “They had problems finding it.”

He rolled his eyes at that, then offered his elbow to her. “Shall we, then?”

She didn’t take his offer but glared at him instead. He didn’t seem offended by this and strode ahead, towards a small, discrete flight of stairs. He was a Superpower and moved with all the subtle grace and ease that that implied; if she concentrated hard enough, Erzsébet could feel the earth tremble with every step he took.

Outside, it had stopped snowing and the clouds had parted, revealing a sky as blue as cut lapis. The sun was bright and the gathered snow even brighter, but the wind still nipped at bare skin.

Erzsébet tugged on her gloves and pulled her fur-lined cap over her ears. She unraveled her scarf from her coat pocket and draped it around her neck. Ivan did the same. That ancient beige scarf, embroidered with blocky red Slavic patterns on the ends, was as much a part of her inner image of Ivan as his piercing blue-violet eyes. He draped it around his neck and let the ends dangle by his hips, like the vestibules of a priest, or maybe that of an undertaker.

Ivan plucked his cigarette from behind his ear and lit it with a match he pulled from his coat pocket. He turned left and down a busy boulevard, where the sidewalk trees were bony and twitched in the wind.

They passed a group of young men in olive green fatigues and bright red berets. One noticed Ivan and stopped to salute him, but his Nation dismissed him with a wave and a warm, “At ease, soldier.”

Signs hung in the large ground level windows, declaring that _Yes, We’re Open_. Fliers stapled on telephone poles spoke their own language—missing pets, reminders for upcoming Party meetings, advertisements for the university’s orchestra performances. Ivan took notice of one, a small white sheet, with something scrawled by hand in black. He had ripped it off before Erzsébet even had a chance to read it. He quartered it and slid it inside his back pocket.

She pointed to a nondescript cafe just up the block. The coffee there was mediocre and the muffins were stale, but the cost was cheap, and food, after all, needn’t be anything more than a means to energy.

Ivan looked at her with incredulity. He gestured, instead, to a restaurant across the street. The name of the establishment had been painted on the large window with gold and black in curling script. The servers, with high collars and white gloves, brought food to tables draped with white cloth. At the table behind the window sat two women: one with pearls and bright red lipstick, the other with a ring Erzsébet could see even from her distance—the wives, certainly, of high Party officials.

Erzsébet knew this restaurant and licked her lips in quiet anticipation.

In those last days of glorious Empire, Gyözö’s had been a favorite of the nobility and government officials, who gathered in droves to its front patio, enjoying warm-weathered frivolities after weeks of official business in Vienna. Under fairytale lights, they passed bottles of champagne and schnapps while a string quartet serenaded them. Though the wine and the spirits were hearty and potent, and the kitchen staff could recreate the hills of Tuscany with his knives and pans, the chef’s true talent lay in his birth town, a village in the plains of Transdanubia.

The soft tomatoes and the tender beef shoulder, seasoned with roasted garlic and cracked caraway seeds of Gyözö’s goulash, returned her to the long, sunny days of her youth. Some time after the woman with the white flower stopped coming to the bogrács, she was introduced to Tribe Magyar. He was a burl of a man, the first of her kind that she had met and the first to teach her what it meant to have two souls. His lessons often came with a healthy serving of goulash and salve for whatever wounds her training had opened.

Erzsébet had wanted the chef to join her in Vienna, lest she grew homesick again, but Gyözö had politely declined.

Gyözö’s grandson, who managed the place now, had altered the menu, gravitating towards more Russian dishes, to appease the wives of occupying Soviet officers. The quality of the home plates seemed to drop, but it mattered little to Erzsébet. She didn’t have the money to eat there anymore.

“Don’t worry about paying, _Tovarish Vengria_ ,” Ivan reassured coolly. He exhaled a line of smoke, looked down at her, and smiled. Her stomach churned, and Erzsébet had to stop herself from curling her lip. She did clench her fists though.

“‘ _Ot kazhdovo po sposobnostjam_ …’” he started.

“‘To each according to his needs,’” Erzsébet finished bitterly.

Ivan _tsked_ and shook his head. “In Russian, _Tovarish Vengria_. You know better than that.” He used the informal _you_ again, and her cheeks prickled.

Erzsébet tried to imagine what it must be like to be a giant, to take up so much space and to heed so much influence. The only one who seemed to meet Ivan blow for blow was young Amelia, the United States, but that was hardly a comforting thought. She had met the girl only once in passing back in Paris during the negotiations marking the end of the Great War. The United States really was just a girl: cheeks red with acne, soft hands and narrow hips. Despite all of the girl’s reassurances and charm, Amelia had a martyr’s pension for self destruction—just like Ivan. If pride goeth before the fall, their bruised egos would bring the world to ash.

Erzsébet’s stomach growled as if on cue. Ivan chuckled and took a drag.

“I’m waiting,” he crooned. He turned from her and closed his eyes, taking enjoyment of her irritation and what little warmth the sun provided.

Her pride snapped so cleanly and succinctly, she thought she had heard a sound.

“And I am _not_ one of your Slavic cousins you can just kick around, _Oroszország!_ ”

He looked down at her, a hint of his amusement smudged away. It charged her; made the fire blazing inside her hotter.

“You will speak to me with respect, Braginskiy Ivan,” she commanded. “Listen to me, goddamn you, I am an Empire!” She grasped his solid arm and tried to turn him to face her. His large frame hardly budged.

Ivan’s laugh was mirthless, dripping with condescension. He faced her then, on his own accord, took a quick drag from his cigarette and tossed it aside into the snow. It was only half-done.

He shook his head and smirked at her boldness. Erzsébet snarled and was about to snap back at him, when suddenly he leaned into her line of sight. It was a move so quick, so sharp in its execution, that her heart fluttered in her neck and she had to lock her jaw to keep her yelp locked inside.

Ivan’s violet eyes bore into her the way oil rigs tear at the earth.

He lifted a finger between them. “You _were_ an Empire, _Vengria_ ,” Ivan sneered. “But those days are long over.”

His hand was larger than her face. His stubby fingers could reach around the crown of her head and snap her neck with with hardly more than a wrist flick.

Would her death smother the growing hum of those who simply wanted security in the night, knowing that they would not be snatched from their beds and taken away?

Erzsébet’s cheeks went numb, and loathing, as cold as snow and thick as mercury, pooled in her stomach, filling in the spaces between the terror. Her own hands trembled at her side. She prayed Ivan couldn’t see them.

“I’m not busting _my_ ass scrubbing fascism from your country—” he jabbed her forehead with enough force to make her reel back and swat his hand away.

“Socialism with a human face isn’t fascism, _Oroszország_!”

“In Russian!” He shouted.

“Stalin has been dead for two years now!” she bellowed.

He stepped into her space again and hovered close enough to her that she could count the sunspots across the bridge of his hook nose; she could see the flecks of blue in his eyes; the pulse racing in his neck. Her breath caught as she took a step back, but she did not gasp; she did not cry out.

“I’ll find a way to reinstall Rákosi to knock some sense into you if need be,” he said, “don’t test me, _Vengria_.”

Erzsébet’s body seized as if he had slapped her.

General Secretary Rákosi Mátyás had called himself the best pupil, the most ardent disciple of Joseph Stalin, and seemed at times to be in a race to surpass his mentor.

Politics might not be like an untamable horse, but people and Nations broke like them all the time. How much more efficient to do both at the same time? She had been taken, with several others of her people, into a dark, damp hole somewhere in the eastern provinces. They had been instructed not to kill her as they bore into her the proper ways of thinking and behaving, only teasing her with the possibility of the momentary peace death brought. She had to say her new name, _Magyar Népköztársaság_ (not _Magyar Királyság_ , never that name again), until her voice was nothing more than a strained whisper, and even then, she had to say it again and again until there were no moments of hesitation, no mistakes.

Her bones, which had snapped like matchsticks, still ached with the memory.

“Fuck you,” Erzsébet hissed. She squinted against the sting in her eyes.

Ivan straightened and rested his hands on his hips. He ran his tongue over his teeth. “You want to talk about respect.” He spat the word.

“I’m not Serbia,” she breathed. “I’m not Czechia or Bulgaria. You can’t—”

“ _Vengria_ , you should be on your knees—” with splayed fingers, he gestured to the sidewalk “—thanking me for your liberation.” He wasn’t shouting anymore, and that sent tremors down her spine.

“You weren’t there,” Erzsébet croaked. Her neck strained. She despised how pitiful she sounded.

“Forgive me for my absence,” He threw his arms wide, as if in genuine surrender. With one long stride, he was in her face again. “I was a little preoccupied at Auschwitz.”

Erzsébet pressed her lips together and held her breath, hoping to alleviate the pressure building in her chest, but to no avail. She keened.

“Now say it again,” Ivan demanded. “Correctly, this time, so I can eat.”

Erzsébet had never been a superpower, not in the way Ivan was, and she never would be. Doomed, the state of Hungary was, to be a weak state, suffering what she must, while the strong states did as they pleased—just as Thucydides prescribed.

Her tongue was heavy as she finally uttered the words, no louder than a whisper, “ _Kazhdomu po…po potrebnostjam_.”

To each according to his abilities, to each according to their need.

“Your intonation needs work, but it’s passable.” He paused for a moment, the muscles in his jaw clenching. “You’re a Satellite, _Vengria_ , don’t forget that. And the next time I come around, I better not see shit like this.”

He pulled out the folded flier from his coat and flicked it in her direction; it fluttered to the wet sidewalk like a butterfly with clipped wings. She crouched down to pick it up before its message bled too deeply into the melted snow. With trembling hands, she opened the sheet and gasped at its content. She covered her mouth to stifle the sound.

In large, skinny handwriting, the author of the document had written only one thing: _Szabadság_. Freedom.

She choked, but the tears blurring her vision and stinging her eyes did not fall.

Ivan grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her to her feet. He dragged her across the street, as if she were a dog on a leash.

 

* * *

 

The sun was bright but beginning its descent when Erzsébet slammed the door to her office behind her and tossed her satchel beside her desk. She pressed her hands into her face and screamed with her jaw clamped shut until her voice gave out.

It was a small office, hardly bigger than the living space in her apartment. The walls, rumbling with the central heating, were mostly bare, save for a map of her lands on the western side, and upon the east, a poster—Lenin, Marx and Engels standing shoulder to shoulder, like a royal flush fanned out on a poker table, against a scarlet field and gazing into the glorious victory of communism. Blocky gold Cyrillic at the base of the poster echoed those sentiments.

It took every ounce of willpower to root herself in her spot, to stop herself from snatching the poster right off the wall and chucking it out the large window behind her desk.

The window that overlooked Buda’s hillside and the frozen Danube curving along it, glittering in the afternoon sun like a gem.

 _Her_ Danube.

 _Her_ capital.

 _Her_ people.

 _Her_ country.

That feeling was there again, in the back of her raw throat, in the pit of her cold stomach: that honey-sweet song humming for change; that forbidden red apple— _revolution_. How she wanted to stand up to him, but Ivan had armies: tanks and planes and young boys sauntering about her streets with rifles. He had the influence of her leaders that even she, their Nation, could not procure. She had…students. She had students and farmers and shadows of a power, of an era, whose time and relevance on this earth had long since expired.

Erzsébet huffed, heart pounding in her neck, and walked around the corner of her oak desk. From the wide center drawer, which rattled with pens and other knick-knacks, she pulled out a steel letter opener. It had been a gift, but from whom and for what occasion, she could not remember.

The weighted handle was porcelain, smooth and white, painted with red and blue flowers and warm to the touch. She gripped it until her knuckles were white and her fingers were pulsing, imagining she could draw courage from its core like the juices of an orange.

She loosened her grip and lobbed the letter opener like a coin. The narrow blade lay flat in her palm. The handle pushed the knife’s razor-thin edge into her fingers, digging into the skin but not breaking it. At its base was a small allowance of pride— _Made in Csongrád_ —engraved in small, delicate letters.

She bobbed the blade, feeling the weight again and adjusting her hold only slightly, and glanced at the unadorned wall before her.

Where two sheets of plain cream wallpaper met, their edges had begun to peel and curl in on themselves, like a leaf caught in a fire. The gap exposed a dark spot, where water had seeped in from rusted pipes.

She steadied the arm holding the knife forward and took a step back at an angle.

She pointed her shoulder at the wall. Imagined Ivan, the Nation State of the great Soviet Union, standing where that split was. Kept the blade flat in her hand. Raised her elbow.

And with a loud grunt, threw the blade as hard as her muscles allowed.

The knife struck the wall with a muted _thump_ and the handle was still. Instead of drywall, however, she imagined it puncturing Ivan’s flesh and cleaving his lungs.

It had been centuries since she had any need to throw a dagger, but her body remembered the motions, the way an old pianist remembered scales and arpeggios—fluidly, effortlessly, impeccably.

Recovering, Erzsébet ran her hand through her hair and tucked her bangs behind the floral clip. Had she been only human, such a dull thing would never have been able to penetrate the drywall.

But Erzsébet was more than some petty human to be trifled with.

 

* * *

  

It seemed like an eternity, but somehow the sun did set and the workday did end.

While she could not, in good faith, consider her venture for food fortuitous, she could call it a shade of lucky. At the grocers, she managed to haggle the price of a loaf of bread to something manageable. At the butcher’s, where she only had to wait in line fifteen minutes instead of the usual half-hour, she purchased two chicken breasts and two chicken legs. She couldn’t negotiate a price for them, but for an extra forint, the woman behind the counter was willing to add a can of stock.

As the woman rang up Erzsébet’s order, she found her thoughts lingering on those who settled in the provinces, who toiled the land for few benefits in return, where the crisis of food had been most deeply felt. She grimaced. Their cries for change rang in harmony with that of her city-dwellers.

The snow glimmered in the streetlights. It covered cars and trams, dusted the shoulders and caps of passersby. It faded footsteps and tirelines until there was nothing left but a white as smooth and soft as a down feather. It was as if those shuffling home had materialized right from the frigid air. A truck, with a flashing yellow light, crunched down the road carefully, while a man in its bed cranked a device that spit out salt, striking the asphalt like marbles.

By the time Erzsébet reached her block, the hems of her pants were thoroughly soaked, the freezing water climbing up the material past her ankles. Her feet were numb, pins and needles stinging her toes, and with every whistling gust of wind her whole body convulsed. Her teeth chattered.

After what felt like five minutes of blindly groping for her keys in her satchel, Erzsébet came to a stop in the glow of a golden streetlight. She adjusted the bag on her hip and pulled her glove off with her teeth. Her fingers were bright red and heavy with numbness. She grasped the metal ring; her stomach leaped. A sharp gust cut across the boulevard and her long bangs flapped around her face. The little hairs on the back of her neck rose, reacting to both the cold lashing at her cheeks and her keyring rubbing against her numb skin.

“Gotcha, ya little bastard,” Erzsébet muttered smugly to herself as she pulled out the keys. They jangled in response, as if to apologize.

As she pulled on her glove, Erzsébet realized she was not alone. A man stood next to her, leaning against the pole. He must have been there for some time, because his shoulders and the top of his cap were powdered with a layer of snow. His hands were jammed into his pockets.

The stranger was tall but not extraordinarily; he could slip into a crowd and disappear with little trouble. Despite his bulky clothes, she could tell his figure was slim but not skinny. There was a power in the way he stood; like if he needed to, he could sprint away from trouble (or into it, a little voice in the back of her mind said). He seemed about her age, maybe younger, but not by much.

The jacket he wore, a dark shade of blue and buttoned all the way to his chin, was years old, faded along the edges of his sleeves and elbows. The straps to his knapsack looked even older, keeping hold of his things by a thread and a miracle. His corduroy slacks were a dusty shade of brown, with a frayed tear at the knee. His flat cap, smoke grey and herringbone, cast dark shadows across his face.

When she met his gaze, his shoulders jerked, as though he’d been prodded with something. Erzsébet narrowed her eyes. Her stomach squirmed, and Erzsébet gripped her key by her side as she would a knife.

She turned to face him and asked, “Can I help you?”

The stranger’s shoulders twitched again, but he said nothing.

Erzsébet scowled. Another frigid breeze sliced through the street and she curled into herself. “Do you need me to call someone for you?” At his silence and stillness, she tried, “ _Russkiy?_ ”

She thought he shook his head. It was such a subtle movement that it could have been only the wind that disturbed him. Her stomach crawled again, like it was trying to reach her ankles. Though she could not see it completely, she didn’t like the way he stared at her.

“No, you don’t want me to call someone, or no, you don’t speak Russian?” Erzsébet grumbled.

When he said nothing again, irritation grazed her nerves.

“Well, listen. It’s freezing and I’m going inside. If you are content to just stand out here and—”

The stranger moved with the swiftness she assumed he had. He removed his cap and held it in both of his gloved hands, wringing it slightly. The wind ruffled his white hair, slightly longer on top than the sides, and the amber streetlights reflected in his deep Prussian blue eyes.

Erzsébet must have died right then. Surely. Her heart had stopped beating and her lungs had stopped breathing, and as much as her Nationality kept her alive in the most dire of situations, her body still needed to perform those basic functions to live.

Or perhaps if she hadn’t died, then this must be a dream. How many times had her unconscious mind stitched together this very scene? Only for her to wake to a cold room and a cold bed and a cold, terrible feeling of loss in her chest.

She felt nothing: not the weight of her satchel, not the frozen water gathering around her ankles. She might have been able to keep hold her bag of food, but her keys plopped into the snowbank with a soft _chink_.

His expression was sheepish, as though he was embarrassed for startling her. He opened his mouth to speak but no words could be said. He released a shaky breath, pluming before his mouth like a thin cloud in an afternoon sky.

Her sole tether to this plane, the one thread of hope that this was real and that she clung to with the fervency of a convert, was the rapid beating of her heart.

A car rolled by slowly, as to not slide on the slick street, crunching snow and salt. The streetlight above droned.

Finally. Gilbert, the Nation State of Prussia, spoke. His voice was husky, his Hungarian deeply accented.

“Hey. Zsóka.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 3, or as I like to call it, Erzsi has a very long, very bad day.
> 
>  
> 
> ~~Didja see it? Didja see it I dropped the title in the dialogue!!1~~
> 
>  
> 
> I'm really really sorry for how long it takes to actually upload these chapters. Grad school, as Rick James once famously coined, is a helluva drug. But, things are starting to calm down a bit now. Once I'm in a good place with Chapter 6, I'll get the next one up! Hopefully sooner than two months ><
> 
> Once again, can we get a round of applause for my lovely lady beta, [Miranda](http://221bdisneystreet.tumblr.com/)? Without her keen eye and delicate honing, this fic wouldn't be the feels cannon that it is. Give her a follow and say hello! :))
> 
> And. Hmm. Guys. Give it up for my friend [Mayya](http://orangeplaneta.tumblr.com/) and her wonderful, gorgeous art. This was me when I got the final image in my email:  
>   
> Please, please, please let her know that you're enjoying her art!
> 
> Now that that's out of the way, let's get to some notes. One of the worst things about having months in between writing the chapter and uploading it is I forget what I wanted to highlight in this section, and it's been so long since I've read any of these docs that I've actually forgotten what was in them. My b. So, again, if I've completely missed something, let me know. We'll start easy--
> 
> Hungarians do the whole last name first. That's why that's there.
> 
> There was a supply shortage, especially with regards to food. This was one of the trigger points for the Revolution to start off with. Soviet troops also did occupy Budapest for quiet some time after the war. Again, this was seen as another trigger point for the revolution.
> 
> The Hungarian government wanted to ease up on the harsh impositions of Communism. Like Gorbachev thirty years later, there was a desire for some kind of middling way. "Communism with a human face" is a phrase I remember reading, though it's one of those phrases that gets tossed around a lot for Gorbachev. The hardliners in Budapest's capital as well as the Soviets in Moscow were not happy about this direction as any kind of shift was seen as a threat to the System.
> 
> While after the Revolution, Hungary would be known as the best bunker in the Soviet camp, before then, things were really touch and go. From what I've read of the Cold War in general, compared to many of the other Soviet states and satellites, the Russians were doing well enough that, in this chapter, Erzse would have noticed.
> 
> Ivan and Ersze's consternation with each other is less of a consideration on real politics and more of my own headcanon regarding their relations. Though, I will say, I've seen a couple of papers that have considered Soviet Poland, East Germany and Hungary as the biggest thorns in Moscow's side during the Cold War. Don't know where I read that, but I'll leave it here as food for thought anyway.
> 
> I'm gonna be an ass and just give links to the docs I read without pointing out exactly where each piece of information comes from. If you have trouble getting into them because they're academic links, let me know and I'll forward you the actual PDF link.
> 
>   * [The Obligatory Wiki Page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hungary#Stalinist_era_.281949.E2.80.931956.29)
>   * [Békés, Csaba. "Cold War, Détente and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution" (Working Paper). _International Center for Advanced Studies_ : New York University. 2002. ](http://www.coldwar.hu/html/en/publications/detente.pdf)
>   * [Rainer, János. "The New Course in Hungary in 1953" (Working Paper). _Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Cold War International History Project_ , Washington, DC. 2002](http://www.rev.hu/rev/htdocs/en/studies/1945_56/rainer_newcourse.pdf)
>   * [Michener, James A. _The Bridge at Andau_ Random House: New York. 1957.](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bridge-at-Andau-James-Michener/dp/0812986741)
>   * [Jundt, Tony. _Post War: A History of Europe Since 1945_ Vintage Books: New York. 2010](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Postwar-History-Europe-Since-1945/dp/009954203X)
> 

> 
> Hopefully it won't be another three months before an update, but for those of you who have stuck around, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. From the bottom of my heart. &hearts


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _[Erzsébet] stepped forward. “Why did you walk from Hont?”_
> 
> _“I ran out of money at the border!” He tossed his arms out in surrender._
> 
>   _“How did that happen?”_
> 
> _He pointed at her. “Don’t make me answer that.”_
> 
> _“What are you hiding from me?”_
> 
> _“What difference does it make?”_
> 
> “Because Russia is fucking here!” _She bore her teeth and clawed her hands._  
> 

Erzsébet led him inside. Gilbert surrendered his canvas knapsack and black leather boots by her front door, but kept his coat and gloves on. As she stepped into the kitchen, he hovered in the threshold. They had nothing to say to each other, so she filled the silence with Radio Budapest. A sweeping, sentimental piece performed by an old, popping record and bursts of static came through the old, mesh speakers.  
  
She went to the sink to wash up, and let the biting hot water run over her white and numb hands, coaxing feeling back into her fingers. For a brief moment, she wondered if the same might happen to her mind if she climbed into the basin and let the water run down her scalp and back.  
  
When her fingers turned from white to red, when she could flex them with ease, she turned off the spigot and flicked the excess water from her hands. She wiped them dry on the sides of her pants. Peeling back the cream colored curtains that hung in the window, she peeked outside: street lamps shook against the wind, parked cars had turned into mounds of white and a few unlucky souls braced themselves and shuffled down the street. The wind whistled in the spaces between glass and pane.  
  
Erzsébet caught Gilbert’s reflection in the dark window. He still leaned against the doorway, fidgeting with the cap in his hand, scratching at the patchy stubble along his jaw. He stood with all the apprehension of a person standing on a train platform, unsure if the approaching train is truly theirs.  
  
Erzsébet sighed quietly. He didn’t wear anxiety well, though no one did, she supposed. Of them, Roderich perhaps masked it the best.  
  
He caught her eye in the mirror-like window and straightened. “Do you…” he cleared his throat. “Do you need any help?”  
  
The last time they spoke, Gilbert’s voice was not as deep, not as rough, so she wondered just how many packs of cigarettes he had burned through in the interim. His Hungarian had been provincial but passable then (they mostly spoke German with each other, even at official outings, because he refused to speak French out of principle). Now, he sounded like one of the Czechoslovak students at the university, tongue stumbling around unfamiliar consonant clusters and verb declensions.  
  
The informal _you_ , which he tossed as nonchalantly as a piece of litter, brushed across her nerves like a thorn. Erzsébet pressed her lips together and dropped the curtain and her gaze. She reached for the linen apron hanging over the oven’s handle and slipped the top loop over her head.  
  
“I am making _Paprikahuhn_ ,” she replied over her shoulder, trying to keep her voice as smooth as the growing snow outside.  
  
She heard his coat rustle in movement, as though he adjusted his stance in the doorway. After a moment, he murmured, “We can speak Hungarian.”  
  
Erzsébet tied the string around her waist with a bow and let her hands fall on the cool rim of the sink. She drummed a rhythm on it, not in particular time with the music, for the melody was slow, somber and contemplative, and her mind raced like a horse on a track. She ran her tongue over her teeth and kept her eyes fastened on the drain, wishing she could slide into the pipes and disappear.  
  
Perhaps it was nothing more than the aching, forlorn pull of the cello’s strings compelling the sprout of guilt in her heart, but she turned to face him against her better judgment. His words were an offering of peace, a concession of some sort. She leaned against the sink and crossed her arms and did not look away from his eyes.  
  
She sighed through her nose and restated in Hungarian, “I am making chicken paprikash.”  
  
He looked at her with all of the gratitude and hope of a gallows-sentenced man given pardon.  
  
With the smallest traces of a smile, she continued, “If _I_ needed help making that, then the world is in far more dire straits than we thought.”  
  
Erzsébet wouldn’t necessarily call what he did in response a smirk, but the corner of his mouth did quirk upwards. The light caught his blue eyes in such a way that it almost rendered his expression charming, despite the tightness around his lips. He stood then as a shadow of her memories, and Erzsébet’s smile faded. She quickly turned from him and busied herself with gathering utensils before he could ask what was the matter.  
  
He had no right to desecrate the place in her heart where she had laid him to rest.  
  
“Sit,” she instructed over her shoulder, pointing to the single chair in the kitchen. Gilbert did so.  
  
Erzsébet dipped under the sink and pulled out the plank of wood she playfully called a cutting board. Its middle was so worn with age and use that the pine had turned rough and white. She set it aside, atop the small table to her left.  
  
The cello on the radio sank into deep and resonant notes the way a dandelion floats to the earth on a breeze. Violins and flutes twirled over it, a sparkling moment of major-tuned relief, like the sun breaking through a heavy set of clouds.  
  
The sun was warm and bright that day, a fact she recalled quite easily because such days in February were rare. The sun smelted a glass-blue sky, burnished away the clouds and made the icicles drip, drip, drip outside her open window. A chestnut-colored swallow, with beady black eyes rimmed with gold, had not gone south for the season and sang a song, it seemed, just for her. She clutched her teacup with still-aching hands, but it was 1947 and the war was over. It was over, it was over, it was over.  
  
Erzsébet undid the buttons on her cuffs and rolled them past her elbows. The skin, already purple, was slightly tender, and she winced as she brushed past it. It would hurt more tomorrow, to be sure.  
  
“What happened?” Gilbert asked. She answered with the wave of her hand.  
  
She cut the twine and unwrapped the chicken from its wax paper. As she ran it under the cold water, she looked for pinfeathers. She found a few, not many, and with her long and shaped nails, pulled them out like splinters.  
  
Waves of violin and viola strings carried the cello’s crescendo like the sea beckons a boat from its shores.  
  
They were like white sails atop ships on the Danube, the broken pieces of porcelain swimming in a scalding lake of tea. When the announcement came across radio waves, a possibility she had been aware of, naturally, but nothing she had given serious consideration to, the cup slipped from her fingers. The shards cut and latched into her palms. The tea, stained red now, scorched her skin. That’s why her shoulders quaked and her voice broke and why it felt like something had been pulled, pulled, _torn_ from somewhere near her heart.  
  
Erzsébet felt for the joint in the chicken’s leg and slid the blade in between it. With a grunt and a push, she cleaved the thigh from the body. A little blood gathered at the bone and slowly dripped onto the cutting board. She did the same to the other leg and again to the wings. She sprinkled salt and cracked pepper over them and mixed their pieces in a bowl. It rang as she stirred the contents.  
  
In those first few days, her telephone remained silent. The lines which crisscrossed her cities and countrysides hardly worked for domestic calls, let alone international ones. She wrote to Feliks, Poland, to Slavjena, Czechia, to even Tomásh, Slovakia, and received not a damn thing from any of them. (She would learn later, however, that Feliks had known of Gilbert’s fate and tried to get word to her, but the chaos within his own country had taken far too much of his time and of his energy; that Slavjena had no indications one way or the other; and that Tomásh simply didn’t care). Out of a moment of desperation, Erzsébet had even written to Ludwig, but the letter never left her borders.  
  
She had gone to the bridge which led into the town of Andau (she had to cross the border somehow to find Roderich; she had to talk to him) and was stopped by barbed wire, Soviet tanks and her own soldiers telling her to turn around and go back home. She resisted and was beaten.  
  
The pots clamored as they struck the floor, ringing in time with Erzsébet’s swears. She kept her pots and pans stacked precariously, and the large cast iron pan was positioned in such a way that disaster was inevitable. When she stood, she kicked an errant lid to the side and placed the heavy pan on her stovetop with a clang. Gilbert flinched. Were it possible, Erzsébet would have sworn his hollowed cheeks had grown paler, like that of a sheet, or maybe a specter.  
  
After three years of unanswered queries, after three years and no evidence to suggest the contrary, Erzsébet assumed, or rather knew, Gilbert was dead.  
  
On the 25th of February, 1950, she took an evening to herself—used the last forints of her salary to buy a bottle of schnapps, flavored with plums and imported especially from a small distillery from what they now called East Germany—and drank from a cracked crystal glass meant for champagne. She had nursed her alcohol with ancient memories and just enough self-awareness to know there was nothing more pathetic than mourning someone alone.  
  
As she pulled her last shot, and as her body settled into a thick, warm numbness, Erzsébet half-hummed, half-sang an old tune once used to accompany a casket as it was lowered into the cold, hard earth. “Let him rest, let him rest, ’till the day of judgement.”  
  
She tried to think of what his elements might be, as if she were God and had the burden of determining the righteousness of his soul. Diligence and determination, certainly, and all those other virtues they deemed _Prussian_. But he was also, if only to a select few among a tightly knit inner circle, warmhearted and…loving if she were being honest with herself.  
  
And the Nation State of Hungary was nothing if not honest with herself.  
  
Erzsébet squeezed her eyes shut against the prickling sensation in them and wiped her nose across her shoulder. It was the onions, she told herself as she diced them and dumped them into a pan lined with oil (because who had the money for butter anymore?). After a brief moment, the onions sighed. The tomatoes, which bore their guts and seeds on her cutting board with every slice, came next. Then a serving of stock, four cloves of peeled and minced garlic, and the sticky hands that come with it. Finally, a handful of rust-colored paprika. As the steam rose with the powerful scent of spices and vegetables, Erzsébet stirred the contents with a wooden spoon.  
  
The song ended with the strings and oboes dancing around a solitary melancholy cry from the cello, like the wind and fallen leaves whirling around a steady oak tree.  
  
A deejay read the piece’s title: Rachmaninov, _Vocalise_ Opus 34, Number 14. Being the top of the hour, Radio Budapest turned from music to its litany of headlines, the first being a story regarding the continued troubles in the rural areas. Troubles, the anchor assured its listeners, that were nothing more than Western provocations. Vigilance and unity, they declared, were the antidote for these nefarious forces.  
  
A warm and dull ache slipped into the joints in her hands: hands that at one time held the long, rough handle of a scythe; hands, that at one time, pressed flour, yeast, water and salt until it became bread. A thought crawled its way in from the back of her mind. It was a different kind of cry, a different kind of hurt, from the murmurs she felt from her university students and city dwellers, but a symptom of something much greater all the same. A shiver ran down her spine.  
  
“Turn that off,” Erzsébet said as the anchor began extolling the virtues of collectivized farming.  
  
Gilbert did so.  
  
The silence that settled over the room was as full and clear as the tolling of church bells.  
  
She glimpsed over her shoulder at Gilbert, who was still wearing his coat and gloves for some odd reason. He toyed with his cap, as if the question he so obviously wanted to ask could be pulled from its thick material.  
  
Erzsébet prompted him. “Yes?”  
  
He glanced at her, then looked back down. He turned the cap’s band around once, twice, then three times.  
  
“What is it, Gilbert?” Erzsébet sighed impatiently.  
  
He scratched his jaw. “Did you…um. Did you remember to keep it mild?”  
  
The back of her neck bristled. She folded the red sauce over a drumstick. There was enough black pepper rubbed into the chicken’s skin that they were visible even through the steam.  
  
“What kind of paprika did you use?” he asked.  
  
“ _Eros_ ,” she replied. “What?”  
  
“Why?” he asked with a sour face.  
  
“Because I like it.”  
  
“You don’t like _félédes_ anymore?”  
  
She shrugged. She essentially used _félédes_ these days as coloring and garnish.  
  
Gilbert scoffed. “I don’t understand how you people can taste your food when your mouth is on fire like that.”  
  
She twisted her mouth in a grimace. “Should have said something before I threw everything in.”  
  
“I don’t like spicy food. You know that.”  
  
“Before, maybe, yeah I did,” she snapped. Whether her stomach crawled from the fact that he had waited to ask, as though he expected her to remember, or the fact that he continued to dismissively use the informal you was yet to be determined.  
  
With a frustrated huff, Erzsébet gestured to the refrigerator. “Look, if it’s too hot, I have kolbász, cheese, and bread for sandwiches.”  
  
“What kind of cheese?”  
  
“Trappista.”  
  
“And bread?”  
  
“Rye.”  
  
“White?”  
  
She peered over her shoulder and gave him a look of incredulity. “Black,” she said, and returning to the pan, added, mostly to herself, “I’m not a savage.”  
  
He must have heard her, because he chuckled. It was a breathy sort of sound, but genuine in amusement, and something Erzsébet was quite certain she would never hear again.  
  
Like broken shards of glass pushed back into a mirror frame, little details about him came back to mind: that he preferred chicken to pork; that he once gorged himself so much on rich chocolate cake at a state function he had spent most of the evening in the gardens throwing it right back up; that he had absolutely no palette for anything hotter than black pepper.  
  
A tomato rolled off a chicken leg and hissed against the hot iron the same time Gilbert murmured something. Erzsébet faced him and asked him to repeat himself. His attention had been enraptured by the stitches of his cap.  
  
He met her gaze and a touch of pink reached his cheeks. He swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed under the stiff material of his jacket collar.  
  
“Sorry,” he mumbled, holding his hands up in concession. “All I said was sorry.”  
  
Erzsébet made a short noise of disbelief.  
  
Gilbert frowned and, with mild exacerbation, asked, “What?”  
  
“The indomitable Nation State of Prussia _apologizing_?” Erzsébet chuckled ironically. “We may have to fetch a bishop soon, because tonight is just full of miracles.”  
  
She waited for his response: a clever retort defending his honor, a taunting reminder that she apologized as frequently and as well as he. But instead, the hum of the radiator and the sizzle of the cooking meats made up the brunt of his reply. The muscles in his jaw tightened. He dropped his gaze like a child being reprimanded.  
  
She pressed her lips together and dug her nails into the crook of her unbruised elbow.  
  
Erzsébet returned to the pan and stirred, gripping the spoon with white knuckles. A dollop of red broth rolled off the lid and slid onto the stove.  
  
The window rattled with a gust from outside, and the radiator clicked and whirred.  
  
“You should take your coat off,” Erzsébet said over her shoulder. The distant, formal _ön_ (not _te_ ), left an acerbic taste in her mouth, like coffee without sugar or cream. “I’m going to turn the oven on to toast the bread soon, so it’ll only get warmer in here.”  
  
His chair creaked, and apprehension coiled around her stomach as cold as steel. Still, though, she turned to face him again.  
  
A line had formed between his white brows. The ceiling lights glinted off his blue irises in such a way that it reminded her of photographs of icebergs along the Arctic Sea: sharp and frigid and only a tenth of his true intentions. Gilbert didn’t avert his eyes, nor did he blink, as if through the sheer intensity of his gaze alone, he could compel from her an answer to the unasked question hovering over his slightly parted lips.  
  
“It’s warm in here,” she reiterated. She ran her hand up and down her bare forearm. The movement knocked her sleeve down.  
  
In a very small voice, almost a whisper, as if he were in a church, he said, “I’m alright, Zsóka.”  
  
“Don’t be…” She sighed as she leaned against the sink, legs crossed at her ankles. “Don’t be unreasonable.”  
  
“I’m not.”  
  
“Take off your jacket. Please,” she insisted.  
  
Gilbert shrugged. “It’s not too bad. Really.”  
  
“At least unbutton it.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
She flipped her wrist. “Because you look uncomfortable, that’s why. It’s making _me_ uncomfortable.”  
  
Gilbert’s shoulders twitched, as though he’d been prodded or shocked. His expression hardened. “What difference does it make?” he asked.  
  
His tone pricked her nerves like a needle. She pinched her face. “Now you’re just being obnoxious.”  
  
“No. I’m not.”  
  
The paprikash sizzled and soon the aromas of garlic and tomatoes covered the room like morning mist covered the plains.  
  
She resettled on the sink. As she turned her foot in small circles, she kept her eye on her toe. Her sleeves fell again. “Are you…I don’t know…are you _hiding_ something?”  
  
“No.”  
  
She snapped her attention to him. “So you’re just being an ass to be an ass?”  
  
Gilbert’s laugh was biting and ironic, more like a bark than an expression of amusement. Her fingers twitched as an intense desire to push him into the frozen Danube rushed over her.  
  
He twisted in his seat so his back leaned against the wall, his left arm draped across the back of the chair and his legs spread before him. He chewed a piece of his glove, where a thumbnail might be if he had just taken them off, and didn’t look away from her. She noticed a sheen of sweat on his forehead.  
  
The radiator hiccupped.  
  
Gilbert lowered his hand from his mouth, tapping the table with splayed fingers. “Erzsébet,” he said. “What do you want?”  
  
That cold apprehension slithered up her body and snaked around her throat, holding a tight pressure there. She swallowed and it hurt. “I want you to be comfortable.” _Te_ not _ön_.  
  
Gilbert sucked on his teeth. “Why?”  
  
The question itself, the way he asked it, was like the point of a saber in her side. Her eyes flashed. She opened her mouth to curse his animosity, but no words came, just an exasperated puff of air.  
  
He pulled at his lapels, as if that was an answer in and of itself, and shook his head.  
  
Erzsébet pushed herself off the sink and stepped towards him. “Because you show up, uninvited and unannounced—” she ticked each one off with a finger—“looking like you _walked_ here from Berlin and—”  
  
“I didn’t walk from Berlin,” Gilbert muttered.  
  
“You could have fooled me. Look at yourself. When was the last time you even shaved?”  
  
He scowled. “Two days ago.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Because the last time I had a mirror was in Hont, if you _absolutely_ have to know.”  
  
Hont…  
  
The name was familiar to her the way Tribe Magyar’s stories were: distant and muddled and only on the edge of her memory. What she could recall was that Hont was _hers_ , a provincial village with no more than three hundred souls practically sitting on the northern Czechoslovak border. Erzsébet narrowed her eyes.  
  
“What were you doing in Hont?”  
  
“I had to stop somewhere after I crossed the border.”  
  
Erzsébet took a small step to the side to view him straight on. His heel showed through a worn spot in his dark wool sock. The hems of his corduroy pants and the edges of his coat were frayed and stained with mud. The rip over his knee looked fresh, from which she could make out a trace of knotted scabs. Under her careful gaze, red slowly blotted Gilbert’s face like a drop of red ink on a sheet of parchment paper. Realization struck her just as brightly.  
  
“Did you…walk here from _Hont_?”  
  
He didn’t respond.  
  
“Gilbert, that’s almost seventy-five kilometers away!”  
  
He shrugged. “So? I’ve done worse. And so have you in the old days.”  
  
“That’s not even remotely the point and you know that.”  She made small circles around her temple.  
  
“Enlighten me, then.”  
  
She screwed up her face. “I have an airport! You could have flown straight in from Berlin!” He waved her comment away nonchalantly with a scoff. “At the very least, you could have taken the train,” Erzsébet said.  
  
His expression was twisted up halfway between stunned and incredulous.  
  
Slowly and deliberately, Gilbert began clapping. The sound was muffled by his gloves, but each resounding beat was like a drip of water between her brows. He stood in ovation. She felt her lip curl as her hands balled into fists.  
  
“Ladies and fucking gentlemen,” he proclaimed, sweeping his arm in a grand gesture of presentation. “May I pre-sent the _best_ solution of this evening’s problems.”  
  
She snarled at him, “I don’t need your attitude, Gilbert.” He continued as though she had not said anything at all, and in fact, stepped closer to her.  
  
“The _genius_ it must have taken…oh my God, the mere thought that there were tracks connecting our fucking capitals. Absurd! It never _once_ crossed my mind.”  
  
“Go to hell,” she growled.  
  
He leaned into her space. “It’s not like I used to wait for you for hours on that platform. _Every. Single. Summer_.”  
  
She held out a finger in warning and took a small step back. “That’s not fair.”  
  
“And neither is walking from Hont to Budapest. Life’s not fair, Princess, didn’t Roderich teach you that?”  
  
The air was warm and thick with an acrid burning, but Erzsébet was quite sure if she lit a match, the room would be engulfed in flames.

She stepped forward. “Why did you walk from Hont?”  
  
“I ran out of money at the border!” He tossed his arms out in surrender.  
  
“How did that happen?”  
  
He pointed at her. “Don’t make me answer that.”  
  
“What are you hiding from me?”  
  
“What difference does it make?”  
  
_“Because Russia is fucking here!”_ She bore her teeth and clawed her hands.  
  
It was as though she had lifted a record player’s needle from a disk’s groove. Even the pan seemed to fall quiet with the delivery of such news. Gilbert’s eyes went wide and he pressed his mouth shut, as if he was stifling his own sound of horror.  
  
“R-russia’s…here?” He motioned to the ground.  
  
Erzsébet nodded. “Yes.”  
  
“In Budapest?”  
  
“Jesus Christ…” She ran her fingers through her hair with an infuriated sigh and lowered her hands in time with her words. “Yes! He’s here.”  
  
“Shit.” He looked down and rubbed the back of his neck. “Fuck.”  
  
“Oh, I’m sorry. Does that interfere with your plans, Gilbert?” she hissed. He turned to her and glared.  
  
He placed his hands on his hips. She crossed her arms and cocked her hip to the side.  
  
“Well…” he licked his bottom lip. Tossed his arm out and let it hit his leg audibly. “What the fuck is he doing in Budapest?”  
  
“What he always does, Gilbert. What he’s been doing since the War.”  
  
He flinched. A bead of sweat rolled down the side of his pinkened face.  
  
Erzsébet rolled her sleeves back up. “So. Are you going to tell me what you were doing around Hont, or what?”  
  
“Are you going to tell me what happened to you?” He nodded towards her arm.  
  
She scowled. “Don’t change the subject.”  
  
“Russia grabbing you like that?” Gilbert stepped toward her, gesturing to the bruise as if he wanted her to offer it to him for examination.  
  
She jerked away from him and held up her arm, halting him instead.  
  
Gilbert settled on the back of his heels with a sigh.  
  
Her attention darted between his face and the damaged hems of his pants and his coat. She took in the knicks, the wears and tears of his gloves. There should have been thirteen wooden buttons running up his torso—one was missing. Her heart sank as she wondered what lay under his coat, under his gloves.  
  
She hugged her arms tighter across her chest, as if that would warm the cold spots in her chest.  
  
“Why were you in Hont?” Erzsébet asked again.  
  
“I told you already.”  
  
She squeezed her eyes shut and inhaled deeply. The burning smell was so sharp that she could almost taste the blackened embers across her palette.  
  
“Why did you run out of money at the border?” She looked to him, but Gilbert quickly averted his eyes.  
  
He turned slightly and leaned away so she could only see his angled profile. His elbows were still out, as much of a barrier as barbed wire.  
  
The radiator droned and the window shuddered and the wind screeched.  
  
Finally, Gilbert dropped his arms with a sound rumbling from the back of his throat. He combed his fingers through his hair and muttered something, but the content was so ludicrous that Erzsébet must have misheard him. Surely.  
  
She stepped toward him and asked him to repeat himself.  
  
His shoulders sank and, though there was irritation in the lines around his eyes and mouth, his tone carried shame. “Come on, Zsóka,” he groaned and ran his hand down his jaw.  
  
“What did you say?” she asked evenly. She wondered if he could hear her over her heart thundering against her chest.  
  
His cheeks burned red.  
  
“What did—”  
  
“I said I don’t have a _fucking_ visa!”  
  
A fleck of his sweat dripped from the ends of his bangs, which now stuck up in odd angles from when he ran his hands through it. He dragged the back of his wrist against his mouth.  
  
That acrid, charred stench had grown more intense.  
  
“Are you trying to tell me you’re in my country…without papers?” she asked as calmly as her tongue could muster.  
  
“That is _exactly_ what I’m fucking telling you.”  
  
She wondered if her vitriol would crawl through her hot skin and burst like a lesion. Only the strongest threads of self-restraint kept her hand at her side and not striking his cheek.  
  
“You’ve done a lot of really dumb shit over the centuries,” she breathed, “but I swear to _Christ_ , Beilschmidt Gilbert, this is the dumbest and the shittiest.”  
  
“You don’t think I tried to do this the right way?”  
  
“You should have tried harder.”  
  
“I’ve been trying for fucking years!” He stepped forward, dipping into that last word.  
  
She stepped back and kept her hand up. “You need to get out of here.” She pointed to her door.  
  
“It’s _snowing_.” He gestured to the small kitchen window, which trembled as if on cue.  
  
“Tomorrow! In the morning!” she cried. “I’ll get you to the border my-fucking-self.”  
  
He stepped again. “It almost took me two days to get here, Zsóka.”  
  
“You should have thought about that before you crossed the border.”  
  
“I didn’t have a choice.” One final step forward for him, and one more step backward for her.  
  
The rim of the sink dug into the small of her back. She grasped with one hand to steady herself.  
  
Gilbert was not nearly as tall as Ivan, not even as tall as Ludwig, but she still strained her neck to meet his gaze this close.  
  
“ _I_ am not going to a labor camp because _you_ —” She pointed at him, and would have hit his nose if he hadn’t knocked her hand away with the back of his hand. “—were careless.”  
  
“I wasn’t careless.”  
  
“How do you _know_?” Her voice had become shrill. “I-I don’t even know who on this floor is an informant, let alone any random person walking around outside.”  
  
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Zsóka, I know what I’m doing.”  
  
Now it was Erzsébet’s turn to bark her laughter. The sound was acidic enough to burn a hole in the linoleum floor. His expression only hardened, but he did not step away.  
  
“You didn’t even know Russia was here,” she said.  
  
He pressed his lips in a thin line. His nostrils flared.  
  
“It is one thing to sneak around as a human,” she said, giving him a once-over, “but you forget who, and you forget _what_ you are. _Preussen_.”  
  
He slapped the edge of the sink and she startled at the sound. Gripping the sink, he caged her with his arms and leaned into her line of sight. The tips of his thick, white bangs almost brushed against her forehead. Across the bridge of his pale nose and cheeks were the faintest dusting of sunspots; there were fine lines around the corner of his narrow eyes. In his eyes, she could see flecks of grey, like the steel of a newly sharpened bayonet. Her heart fluttered in her neck.  
  
Erzsébet almost snarled and Gilbert almost smirked, but instead, they simply bore into each other’s fury and breathed.  
  
“Do you feel anything?” he asked in a raw, worn voice. His breath caressed her cheeks.  
  
Erzsébet blanched; the back of her neck prickled. “What are you talking about?”  
  
He growled. “Don’t play dumb.”  
  
“I’m not.”  
  
“What do you feel?” he asked.  
  
Erzsébet pressed her lips together and took in a deep breath. Their hands on the rim of the sink did not touch, nor did their bodies, but she could feel the heat rolling off him in waves, and the rough material of his coat sleeves grazed her bare forearms.  
  
Her eyes widened in revelation—the Nation State of Prussia stood right in front of her and hardly a hair rose on the back of her neck. The only time she could recall a Nation having so little by way of Nationality was Heinrich on the eve of the nineteenth century.  
  
She opened her mouth to respond, but with a huff and a push, Gilbert stepped back.  
  
Erzsébet stepped off the sink and toward him. She hugged her arms across her middle and canted her head to the side, only slightly, as if to get a better view of him.  
  
His outstretched hand silenced her unasked question  
  
“Gilbert…”  
  
He sighed as he slowly dropped his arm. “Stop.”  
  
And so she did.  
  
There was not a tremendous space between them, but it was as uncrossable as the desolate, cold Siberian steppe.  
  
Gilbert’s features seemed to cloud then. Her eyes stung and watered and that burning odor, thought to have been a figment of her imagination, was so close it seemed like it was just—  
  
“The paprikash!” Erzsébet cried.  
  
She turned on her heel and, using her apron, grabbed the pan’s handle. A cry of pain escaped her as the metal seared her palm through the apron’s thin material. She pulled it from the burner and all but dropped it on the small table by the sink. She coughed and wiped away the pluming smoke and tried to assess the damage. The contents were mostly black, but with a prod of her spoon, some of it shifted to reveal incredibly overcooked yet still somewhat edible chicken.  
  
She yanked off her apron and threw it on the ground before putting together a rather creative string of Hungarian and German swears. She thought she heard a tiny scoff behind her, but the sound was lost amidst her loud cursing.  
  
Just fucking fantastic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A big thanks to [my dear friend Miranda](http://221bdisneystreet.tumblr.com/) for betaing! Give her a follow and send her some love, especially right now, since she's in the throes of finals!
> 
> And much love to [Mayya](http://orangeplaneta.tumblr.com/) for doing such a bang up job on the art as always!
> 
> ===  
> There's not a lot of historical notes in this chapter, but quite a few things I want to draw your attention to.
> 
> [Rachmaninov Vocalise Op 32 No 14.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0FpMjsBerY) Of all the versions I heard, I liked this one the best.
> 
> [The original recipe I plucked for the paprikash is here.](http://zsuzsaisinthekitchen.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/chicken-paprika-paprikas-csirke.html) There was another recipe I had referenced, but once again, I forgot to write down the new link.
> 
> [There are eight types of Hungarian paprika, which range in pungency and heat.](http://www.thekitchn.com/whats-the-difference-hot-sweet-68134) I have never had eros style paprika, but I've always headcanon'd the Beilschmidts to be very, very White. So even if it's not that bad irl, Gil's still going to make a fuss about it.
> 
> Many, many months ago, when this chapter was first written, I asked [Nicky](http://kisamesfacioplegia.tumblr.com/)if I could borrow her headcanon that Gilbert doesn't speak French. So, that's where that comes from!
> 
> [February 25, 1947, the official abolition of Prussia.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussia#End_of_Prussia)
> 
>  "Let him rest, let him rest/Till the Day of Judgement." [Check this link out for traditional Hungarian funeral rites.](http://mek.oszk.hu/02700/02790/html/171.html)
> 
> This might be a really minor thing, but I wanted to mention this quickly regarding some spelling. Normally, when you see the names Slavjena and Tomásh, they're spelled _Slavĕna_ and _Tomaš_. And I'd venture to say that most times, you'll see Pruessen as _Preußen_.
> 
> The reason why I've altered the spelling a little bit is because one of my number one pet peeves when reading is coming across a name that hasn't been transliterated well. When I see letters that aren't in the Roman alphabet, it takes me out of the flow of the story. I don't want to alienate any of my readers here, so if a name or location I use has a letter outside the usual 24 characters, I'll try to get close to the right sound.
> 
> ===  
> As always, don't forget to kudo, comment & subscribe! :)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _After vespers, Erzsébet would clamor up the the bell tower’s roof and watch the stars peek one by one from their indigo slumber. She would wonder, and that question would bloom in her heart and curl around her toes and fingertips in an ache so stunning that her young tongue couldn’t name it—were there others like her? And if there were others who walked as she did, where were they?_

The snow fell with the steadiness of rain. It gathered on roofs and on cars and on iron-forged fences in little mounds of white, pure as a dove’s down feather. It gathered on the head of the amber streetlight and weighted it towards the earth. The bulb inside it hummed as if by sheer will alone it could turn into the sun and melt away the build up, which now stood close to a dozen centimeters high. Not a single indent from man or beast was pressed into the embankment, which glittered under the small sun’s gaze like shattered glass. Little flecks of snow were dusted up as a brisk wind raced across the dunes and silently jostled the brittle branches of a twisted up old beech tree like a phantom. A creak, low and slow like a ward patient’s moan, came from the steel streetlight as the snow was brushed off its head and it was able to stand upright again.

The cream colored curtains, which hung in her kitchen, rose and fell with that weary sigh of wind. Erzsébet clutched the collar of her forest green coat tight against her throat. A little while ago, she had to open the window to clear out the smoke, but since the blue-grey haze had drifted away, she had simply lacked a reason to close it.

If the Nation State of Hungary was to be honest with herself—and she always was—she did not find the cold so intolerable. The tip of her nose tingled and her fingers were stiff. A shudder passed through her and she pressed her hands into the sides of her paprikash bowl in vain. That she could feel anything at all was something to be appreciated on its own; she had been in a vat of muddled grey sensations since Gilbert made himself known on that sidewalk an hour ago.

Erzsébet brought a spoonful of paprikash to her mouth and grimaced. The broth was bitter, the chicken sandy and dry. She dropped her spoon into the bowl and pushed it away from her. Her stomach pinched and growled, but she had nothing left to stifle it. Gilbert had eaten the last of her kolbász with his sandwich, and there wasn’t much cheese or bread to begin with. 

But she could never satisfy the scraping feeling along her sides or the round, hollow feeling in her stomach. It was the same feeling that hovered over the children of the villages and the elders in the city; the same feeling that plagued them all standing in a line for onions and potatoes and sometimes lemons from distant Soviet lands. Erzsébet leaned on her elbows and pressed the heel of her palm into her eyes until shapes of red and purple appeared.

With a ticking sound, the clock on the stove now read twelve minutes past eight. 

She laced her fingers together and rested her cheek on her thumbs as she looked to the wall which separated her and her guest. Gilbert had eaten his food and fought exhaustion until his body simply gave him no other option but to sleep. Without a word exchanged between the two of them, she helped him get into her bed, and he was unconscious before she even left the room.

She had stood at the threshold and watched him for just a moment before turning off the lights and closing the door. Gilbert was curled up on his side, facing her, with the blankets pulled up so that all she could see was a tuft of white-blond hair, the base of his long and narrow nose and his brows cinched. Not even sleep would leave him a bout of peace. 

She found no rest either in the assurances that he was here and that he was safe. For the past eight years, Erzsébet had been convinced that he was buried in some grave on the outskirts of Berlin. To see him there, his torso rising and falling and eyelashes twitching—alive—was like two plates of Earth’s crust colliding: profound in its impact, devastating in its aftermath. The incongruence slinked around her heart and she held her breath until the pressure built and built and built. 

And then it released.

A gust screamed across the alleyway, and while she braced for it, the chill still sank its teeth into her neck, its bite trailing down her spine like snake venom. Her teeth clattered and her eyes watered and that was enough. She finally rose, pulled the window shut and locked it into place.

She stood there for a moment, watching the tree in the alleyway writhe against the wind.

Erzsébet didn’t trust Gilbert—couldn’t trust him—to get to the border on his own, not after everything it had apparently taken to reach her in the first place, and there was no one else she could trust to drag him to the train station in her stead. Though, to be perfectly honest, of all the steps needed to dump him over to Czechoslovakia, just getting him to the train station would be the easiest. The weather and the distance alone, combined with the rather temperamental disposition of the cashiers and the sporadic nature of the trains, meant that this would be a complex endeavor to say the least.

Somehow, in some manner, it was 1955, and Erzsébet, yet again, was responsible for fixing Gilbert’s mistakes. She could have laughed. She huddled into her coat instead.

She would have to either take the entire day off from work or at the very least, if there were absolutely no bumps or delays, come in several hours late. If she did either of those things, however, she knew in her heart that the sequence of events would unfold at the Politburo thusly.

Every morning, Erzsébet had to pass the office of personnel in order to reach her own office and frequently stopped to speak with one of the secretaries, Valéria. On the occasion that she didn’t have the time or the energy to converse with Valéria, Erzsébet would at least greet her. If Erzsébet was not there to say hello or discuss the day’s goings on, Valéria would mention to her manager the oddity of the Nation State’s absence. Kázmér, whom Erzsébet did not know outside his reputation for being uptight and fussy, would think the same and would ask  _ his _ boss where Héderváry Erzsébet was. This line of curiosity would unravel until it reached the front of Secretary Nagy’s desk, but by that point the damage would have already been done.

Internal Affairs would be the first ministry notified that someone within the government was missing. They would waste no time gathering everyone Erzsébet had spoken to yesterday—Mr. Gereben, Iszák, Valéria. The very best scenario was that they’d be subjected to hours of inquiry, inconvienenced and startled, but still able to return home to their families at the end of the day. Considering the very worst scenario, even for just a moment, caused her already bruised heart to ache.

And Russia. Russia would be right there with the Ministry, as he had access to resources that her government could not tap. He had unmitigated authority among the Hungarians that went completely unquestioned.

She couldn’t call in sick. Nations didn’t take sick days, and besides, she had lived with the pain of a poor economy for so long that not even the wheezes of supply shortages caused her to pause.

What an awful, cruel thing Gilbert had done. He didn’t have the decency, the  _ mercy _ , to resurrect himself on a Friday. He had to stumble back to life on a godforsaken Wednesday.

Erzsébet’s stomach growled again. She gave the bowl she’d pushed to the side a glance and sighed. How many times had she made paprikash over the centuries? She couldn’t remember a time when her hands did not move on their own, guided by a thousand-year-old spirit. The steps for paprikash were as innate to her as the flecks of amber in her green eyes or the slight rasp in her voice.

She scooped up a spoonful and tilted it back into the bowl. A coal that was once an onion splashed into the contents.

Oh, but how many times, no matter the number and sincerity of the compliments she received, was her own subpar to the sunny, tender broth made by the woman from the bógrács? The flavors were so rich and the chicken was so tender that for years, Erzsébet was convinced that some amount of witchcraft had to go into its brewing. She remembered when she used to seek out the woman, hungry for her food and starving for her attention and affection. She remembered when the woman gave each as generously as the other.

She remembered those warm summer days of her childhood, when the only name she knew was  _ Erzsébet _ . When her Nationality did not sit so heavily upon her shoulders.

And when paprikash was made right.

* * *

_ The villagers swore to the Lord and all His Heavenly Host that she was no older than five: hardly taller than a woman’s waist, spindly limbs, round cheeks and a high-pitched voice like that of a bird’s. But their assertions couldn’t possibly be true. Most of them could remember Erzsébet playing with a girl named Ági—and in the past winter, Ági had bore her seventh son. So, they kept their distance, even going so far as to shoo her away from the lord’s fields, which needed all the healthy hands it could to bring in the harvest. _

_ In the center of the village, there stood a red roofed monastery, from which she could hear the hymns and prayers of monks. Whenever she approached the large, wooden door, the abbot, whose eyes were as dark as caves, would turn her away. One of the monks though, would sneak her to the bell tower where she could listen to Mass as long as she was quiet. Sometimes, the monk had an apple for her. Sometimes, if she was lucky, he would talk to her about God and about salvation. _

_ Erzsébet’s days were long, usually spent gathering berries and nuts from the forest and using her leather slingshot to hunt small game. At dusk, she would return to the small square of cellars where the beaten path faded into tall grass and scrawny trees. With only their roofs visible, the cellars poked out of the ground like the heads of spears made of thatching rather than iron. She slept on a bed of hay in a cellar that hadn’t been used in quite some time. It smelled of must and ancient grapes, but it had a roof and it was warm, so she stayed. _

_ The fear and uncertainty of the villagers was as palpable to her as the salt she used to season her hunts. However, Erzsébet knew that she and they were like strings in a tapestry, interwoven in some unseen way to craft a grander, more elaborate picture. She knew this as instinctively as she knew her own name. _

_ A thought would come to her at times, a whisper from somewhere deep in the back of her mind or maybe somewhere near her heart. The sentiment was as warm as the summer sun and as sweet as honey. The woman from the bogrács called it the soul of the earth; the kind monk from the monastery proclaimed it to be the voice of God. Both of them told her to stop and listen to the melody that came to her in moments when her heart felt too big for her body.  _

A mienk _ , it would sing.  _ Ours _. _

_ _

_ After vespers, Erzsébet would clamor up the the bell tower’s roof and watch the stars peek one by one from their indigo slumber. She would wonder, and that question would bloom in her heart and curl around her toes and fingertips in an ache so stunning that her young tongue couldn’t name it—were there others like her? And if there were others who walked as she did, where were they? _

_ Soon after the woman stopped coming to the bogrács, Erzsébet met Tribe Magyar, who lived across the river, and learned the word: Nation. _

_ On a bronze autumn evening, the air was just as heavy with unease as it was with rain. Though the time of harvest marked the beginning of festivities celebrating the year’s end, what had been seen among the stalks of wheat and rye and the rows of cabbage had not brought much confidence. The summer had been warmer than most, after all, and there seemed to be more mice than before skittering about. _

_ Dread, thick as the molten iron blacksmiths used to craft swords and plows, pooled in small Erzsébet’s stomach. She asked the woman from the bogrács if she would come back with her to the abandoned wine cellar. She squeezed her hand so tightly the woman yelped. The woman needed no apology, no further line of explanation. She adjusted the basket on her hip and followed Erzsébet home. _

_ Outside, the woman set up a small fire. She asked Erzsébet if she had anything to cook meats with. When Erzsébet pointed out the sticks she would skewer her rabbits with, the woman’s expression held such distress that a flurry of apologies fell from Erzsébet’s mouth. Her insides had gone cold knowing she had done something to cause the woman strife. _

_ “I’m not upset with you,” the woman assured, looking out to, it seemed, the red-roofed monastery. She didn’t say with whom she was upset, though, which needled in the back of Erzsébet’s mind. _

_ The woman went back to her home to fetch supplies. When she returned, her basket was full of chicken and spice and cast iron utensils. The setting sun had drawn long shadows across the earth. She set up a makeshift stand for the pan to rest, with Erzsébet’s help of course, and began stoking a fire. The light, as orange and soft as apricots, seemed to erase years from the woman’s face.  _

_ They were making paprikash, as they had before, with the paprika they called  _ eros _. It tasted like fire, but the woman said it was the way her mother made it, so it was the way she made it. The wood crackled as they broke drumsticks from the chicken’s thighs and the joint between its wings. _

_ “It’s going to be a bad harvest, isn’t it?” Erzsébet asked. She tried to grasp the pinfeathers with her chewed fingernails, but to no avail.  _

_ “Yes,” the woman said. She kneaded salt and pepper into the skin. _

_ Erzsébet’s stomach twisted as tight as rope. Her hands trembled, making an already difficult task impossible. The woman offered to take her chicken, but the girl shook her head. This was her task to bear; the woman had already done so much. _

_ Images flashed across her mind’s eye, blurring together like an illuminator’s ink tossed out into the creek. She saw empty pockets and empty bowls and empty stomachs. The serfs who toiled the land, the lords who owned it, and the children of both families wailed and moaned. Their unhinged jaws shuddered. The sockets where their eyes should have been were hollow and black. A single voice of suffering chorused. It started as a dull hum, like bees hiding in the folds of rose petals, and then grew and grew and grew until it tolled in her ears like the brass bells in the monastery’s steeple. _

_ Erzsébet’s eyes had gone wide and her lungs had stopped filling with air. Her body was locked into place. _

A mienk, a mienk, a mienk _ —the voice murmured. The suffering is  _ ours _ , but the voice seemed to insinuate that somehow she was responsible for its coming, that she was responsible for its end. _

_ They were strings in a tapestry yes, but somehow, she was also the loom. _

_ But her hands. Her hands were that of a child, because she was a child. She held things as children do, with small, grubby fingers caked with drying mud and chipped off, chewed nails. What could  _ she  _ do that someone twice her age else could not? _

_ Twice her age—what did that even mean to someone like her (who had been so small for so long)? _

_ Were there even others like her? _

_ “Zsóka, what’s wrong?” the woman asked. _

_ As sharp and as suddenly as an icicle shattering against the cold, frozen ground, the images and the sounds stopped. _

_ Erzsébet looked at the woman. _

_ In the wake of the sights and the sounds came a terrible feeling across her middle. It felt as though someone slowly and deliberately dragged the blade of a scimitar across her belly. She pressed her hands to her stomach, expecting her tunic to be wet with blood, but found it dry and her skin intact. The feeling did not fade, nor did it worsen, but its consistency was a type of intensity. _

_ She screamed. Tears streamed down her face. _

_ It hurt. _

_ God, and all the angels and saints, it hurt. _

_ The woman dropped the chicken in her basket and scrambled to her feet. She scooped up the girl from under her arms and propped her on her hip. _

_ Erzsébet could hardly see through her tears. She could hardly breathe. She gripped the woman’s dress because it was something real and her scent, smoke and sweat and spice, was more comforting than a blanket made of wool. _

_ The woman rocked her and half-sang, half-hummed a song about blackbirds. She tenderly petted the crown of Erzsébet’s head. _

_ “Oh, Zsóka.  _ Bogárkám _ ,” the woman crooned. “Where did this come from, hmm? Did you see something again?” She kissed Erzsébet’s temple.  _

_ The girl couldn’t respond, tears still racking her small body (so small, like a grain of sand on the banks of the Danube; small when it should have been bigger, should have grown at least a little by now). _

_ She choked on her cries and wrapped her arms around the woman’s neck. The woman gave no mind to the tears, the spit and the snot that gathered in her clothes or the crook of her neck. She simply continued her lullaby and rubbed small circles into the girl’s back. _

_ “It’s ok,” she cooed quietly and reassuringly. “Zsóka, it’s ok. I’m here.” _

_ Erzsébet wanted to believe her, but her body was a mirror cracking and splintering and shattering. _

_ (But how much worse would this have been if the woman was not there to hold her?) _

_ “I thought the abbot said you weren’t supposed to be around that thing anymore,” a new voice boomed. Erzsébet recognized the baritone as the man who ran the butcher’s stand. She gripped the woman tighter and shook her head, croaking the word “no” as if it were a ward and could keep her as safe as a ring of salt.  _

_ The woman turned to face the intruder. She carefully cradled Erzsébet’s head, keeping the girl from looking over her shoulder. Erzsébet counted the blades of grass and hiccupped. _

_ “Leave,” the woman hissed. _

_ “It’s the reason the harvest is so bad this year. The worst after several bad harvests.” _

_ “That’s not true.” _

_ “You are putting us all in danger by keeping it—” _

_ “Zsóka. She has a name.” _

_ “A Christian name doesn’t change what she is.” _

_ “And what is she, exactly?” _

_ “An affront—” _

_ “She’s a  _ child _.” _

_ “But for how long? Your hair is nearly white now.” The butcher stepped to them and the woman stepped back. Erzsébet caught a glimpse of the rage and fury etched into his face and she shrieked. _

_ A terrible, frightening thought came to her that the butcher might try to pry her from the woman’s arms and keep her from her. _

_ The woman spoke again. Erzsébet heard it more through the woman’s body than through the air: a low rumble like the thunder that followed lightning. “I swear on your dead wife’s grave, if you don’t get out of here right this second, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.” Erzsébet could feel the woman’s heartbeat race, the sincerity of her threat in the way she trembled. Never before had the woman displayed such rage or violence. It sent a shiver down Erzsébet’s spine. _

_ “The abbot will not be pleased when he hears of this,” the butcher growled. _

_ The woman barked her laugh. “My soul be damned then,” she snapped. “I will stand before you, the abbot and God Himself to protect this girl.” _

_ “You’re a wicked woman,” he seethed. _

_ “And you’re a coward.” The woman adjusted Erzsébet on her hip and held her even tighter. The girl’s heart fluttered like the wings of a bird caught in a storm. _

_ A moment passed and Erzsébet could hear the soft shuffling of leather-bound shoes against the grass, growing softer as he disappeared. _

_ The wind rustled the grass, the woman’s skirt, and their hair. _

_ “I don’t suppose he’s gone to gather a mob,” the woman muttered. “Stubborn old fool.” _

_ She pulled back, so she could see Erzsébet’s face and that comforting feeling crested in the young girl’s heart once again. The woman had flecks of amber in her jade green eyes, and they were incredibly, fiercely sad despite the smile on her lips. Erzsébet’s breath hitched. She wondered what she had done in order to draw such a look from the woman. She wondered what she would have to do in order to make the woman’s eyes shine with the same joy she felt whenever she saw her. _

_ The woman brushed Erzsébet’s bangs from her face and curled a lock around her ear. She sighed with content. “There’s my  _ bogárkám _. Safe and sound as promised.” She cupped Erzsébet’s chin and nuzzled their noses together. _

_ Erzsébet’s body still ached, but now, she battled fatigue. A small one such as herself could only scream and cry for so long. As if to emphasize this fact, she yawned and rubbed her eyes with the back of her wrists. _

_ “Yes, my dear, it’s quite late. But you know what? There’s a whole pot of paprikash that needs to be cooked and eaten. How about I wake you when it’s done? Do you like the sound of that?” _

_ Erzsébet nodded and buried herself in the woman’s embrace. _

_ When the meal was done, they ate beside the fire. The woman tossed a piece of wood, somewhere between a log and a stick, on the crinkling, cackling flames. Erzsébet leaned against her while she scooped big spoonfuls of soup into her mouth. It was like eating little drops of sunlight; it filled her belly with contentment and her soul with peace. The woman wrapped her arm around the girl and kissed the crown of her head. She sang a song of blackbirds and flight, and Erzsébet joined her for the chorus. She felt something new stir in her chest. It wasn’t the familiar refrain of  _ ours _ , but of  _ enyém _ — _ mine _.  _

_ And she smiled. _

* * *

 

Erzsébet frowned now. 

She ran the faucet while she poured out the rest of the broth and tossed the bits of chicken into the trash. The snow seemed to have stopped, but the stillness of the night had yet to be disturbed. Against the darkness outside, she could catch a glimpse of her reflection in the thin glass. 

She reached up, took the floral pin from her hair and undid her chingon. As her limp and dull hair fanned out over her shoulders, Erzsébet ran her fingers through her chestnut-colored locks. They were caught on tangles and knots and she could feel the split ends, desperate for a cut or for luscious oils.

Her skin was pallid and parched, white and flaking on either side of her red nose and on her chin and between her eyebrows. Her cheeks were hollowed and the bones sharp; she couldn’t remember a time before Westphalia when her face was this narrow and thin.

Splotches of purple sat under her eyes, which were rimmed with scarlet. It made the flecks of amber in her green eyes stand out all the more. 

Erzsébet folded her arms across her chest and ran her fingertips up and down her sleeves. She tried to pull from the dark corners of her mind the memory of the woman’s touch upon her skin. She  _ knew _ it was a comforting sensation, but she could not remember how it had felt. She  _ knew _ the woman’s hands would have been rough—everyone’s hands felt as coarse as sand back then—but her body could not remember the tenderness and heat.

The woman was a poor, illiterate serf and had died before many of Erzsébet’s fellow Nation States had even been born. Gilbert came to mind, himself born a few, but noted, centuries after her as the confederation of Christian knights based on the Baltic Sea. There was no grave she could visit, no portrait she could look upon. All she had were memories, and they were beginning to fade with time as the summer’s sun rusted green leaves. There was irony in the fact that her meal tasted like the ashes of an urn and it made Erzsébet’s stomach twist.

She reached for the glass and slid her fingers up its cold surface. A little cloud bloomed from her fingertips like the ancient paintings of saints’ halos. They probably still worshiped the saints out in the country, she thought, in their own way now that the churches had been shuttered and the priests either killed or forced out. She wondered if some of them had knotted string in their pockets and ran their thumbs over the bumps to keep time and to keep count of their many, many pleas to Mary while watching their harvest go east to Moscow.

And her students, her darling, young students with stars in their eyes, those dreamers of dreams who saw nothing wrong with a communism that was also kind. She thought of Iszak, whose cousin was having his first child, whose parents were from the country, and whose misguided but commendable and genuine desire to help people pulled him into politics. She wondered if he too had knots of prayers in his pockets, or if the opiate of the masses was a vice he could not afford to imbue.

Erzsébet felt very much like the boy from the Danish story, who kept the flood at bay with a finger jammed into a cracking, crumbling dyke. Something was going to break. Something was going to break soon and she was going to be left with quite a few scars. She imagined, just for a moment, Iszak, and other young people like him, roving the streets with a rifle at his hip and bearing the word  _ freedom _ like teeth. The image did not sit well with her.

They wanted change.  _ She  _ wanted change. But, oh God, was she tired of change only coming at the behest of the spilled blood of children. The others like her would have laughed at such a thought, knowing the scrappy, temperamental beast she was when she was a child.

That Russia and Gilbert had decided  _ now  _ was the time to show up in Budapest made her skin crawl and bile rise in her throat. Couldn’t they just leave her be with her own crack-up and despair?

The muscle in her chin trembled and she bit her bottom lip. She shut her eyes tight and felt her shoulders round up and her body curl into itself. There was a part of her, deep and buried, that thought of the kind woman from the bogrács and reached for her image. What she wouldn’t do to feel the woman’s kiss or her touch or—

A choked sound came from her and she quickly covered her mouth to keep the noise down. Her eyes stung and her throat went tight. 

—or to hear the woman’s voice whisper,  _ There’s my  _ bogárkám _. Safe and sound as promised. _

From ashes to ashes, they say, and from dust to dust thou shalt return. But Erzsébet, cursed with two souls that loved and felt in equal and competing measure, could not die herself, not forever anyway. Even if there was a place beyond this realm for souls to reside for all eternity, she could not be reunited with that kind and patient saint of a woman. To desire those words, to long for that embrace, was nothing more than a fool’s errand. To be a Nation, at times, meant nothing more than to be incredibly, profoundly lonely.

She remembered being propped up on the woman’s hip and the woman telling her that despite her size now, she  _ knew  _ Erzsébet was meant for something important. They watched the sun set against a scarlet sky with the barley, whispering in an August breeze.

Things were so much different back then and in the country. Even the days seemed to be held together by a different material; certainly not time, as the sun used to crawl across the sky as though inconvenienced by the hour. Politics—was that even the right word for managing relations with farmers and tradesfolk—operated in its own suspended universe. How many eggs did Dejana owe Aleksandr because her cows had eaten his grass? When did Szabolcs need to fix Vuk’s roof before their verbal contract was considered void?

Simple.

It had been so long since Erzsébet had even been to the country, but she could not imagine the council for a village of four hundred or so being much larger than ten. She almost laughed despite herself. Imagine, only having to deal with nine other personalities! Personalities who could not hide their ulterior motives because out there, where the grass grew slow and the milk was sweet and the air clear and fresh, there were no ulterior motives to be had. What subversion could be done among cows and hens and stalks of wheat and people you couldn’t run from?

It would be the perfect little pocket to stick Gilbert. Somewhere away from the eyes of the Politburo, from the hyacinth eyes of the Soviet Russian State. A place where trust was a stronger currency than meal vouchers or rubles. Folks in the country, regardless of what century they lived, were a tight, lattice-bound group, who protected their own. Nation State or not, she would need some way to penetrate and fit into that bond and get him under that protection. She needed some piece of leverage, so that if a question of her, or Gilbert’s, whereabouts was raised, a member of that council would say _ they are where they need to be _ .

Erzsébet slowly dropped her hand from her mouth as a memory tore through the dark and reached for the light.

_ He laughed. “I would much rather do this work in the capital though,” he continued. “My cousin, Kolos, is on a village council, and it sounds like an absolute nightmare.” Iszák scoffed and shook his head. _

_ “Where?” Erzsébet asked. _

_ “Ágostan. It’s up north in the middle of nowhere.  _ Maybe  _ four hundred people live there. Maybe. And they’re all old.” _

Iszák!

Erzsébet glanced at the clock on her stove. If she left right now, she could reach central Pest and the bar by ten o’clock. She ran to the hallway, careful to hop around the corner of her table, and gathered her satchel and boots. She closed the door softly behind her before dashing down the hallway and down the stairs.

She had watched hope die in her hands many times over the course of her long life, but she could feel its weak pulse with her own tonight. 

Perhaps it wasn’t too late.

Perhaps she could still fix this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh. Hi everyone! I'm sorry for dropping off the planet for a solid, what, four months? This last semester has been, in a word... _challenging_. I just finished up my last semester of grad classes, but I still have a thesis to write! Not quite out of the weeds just yet, so I can't promise when the next update will be. But in the meantime, for everyone who's stuck around--a million and one thank yous! I wouldn't be here without you.
> 
> As always, a big thanks to [Miranda](http://221bdisneystreet.tumblr.com/) for betaing. Like chapter 3, I'm actually _incredibly_ satisfied with this chapter. I've been chomping at the bit to share it with everyone for a while now. It's really a toss-up between the two as to my favorite written so far!
> 
> I am _absolutely_ floored with [Mayya's](http://orangeplaneta.tumblr.com/) art for this chapter. She captured Ersza's wistfulness and the beauty of the countryside in such simple beauty. I adore Mayya's work, and I am just as excited to share this art as I am to share the chapter!
> 
> On to Historical Notes!
> 
> ==
> 
> There's actually not too many historical notes to share actually. I read as much as I could about life in a Hungarian medieval village. In addition to the conversations I was engaging with in my Reformation class at King's (yes, this chapter is _that_ old), this paper was particularly important in that research:
> 
> Petrovics, Istvan. "The Cities and Towns of Medieval Hungary as Economic and Cultural Centres and Places of Coexistence. The Case of Pécs." Colloquia XVIII (2011): 5-26. <http://bit.ly/2CCJK48>
> 
>  
> 
> [This is the song that I imagined the woman from the bograc's singing to Ersza.](https://open.spotify.com/track/41pXWSe9m4tDCBUVdtYBgA)
> 
>  
> 
> [These are images that I used to design Erzsa's village](http://www.ocsa.hu/index.php?content=galeria&id=41)
> 
>  
> 
> Don't forget to kudo, comment and subscribe! :)


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